Chen Danqing (born 11 August 1953 in Shanghai, China) is a Chinese-American artist, writer, and art critic. He started as a self-taught painter and later obtain a master degree from China Central Academy of Fine Arts. He gained nation wide recognition during the 1980s for his realist paintings of the Tibetans. He moved to the US in 1982 and spent 18 years there as a professional painter. He returned to China in 2000 and lectured at Tsinghua University before resigning in 2004. He published several essay collections and hosted documentary series Local Perspective introducing art to the general public.
Chen Danqing was born in Shanghai with family roots in Taishan, Guangdong province. He began learning oil painting through selfâÂÂinstruction at around age seventeen, when he was sent to the countryside as a sentâÂÂdown youth. In 1968, he acquainted himself with young artists including Xia Baoyuan and Chen Yifei, who he looked up to as a role model and mentor in art. He moved to the United States in 1982 and became a US citizen in 1994. As his grandfather moved to Taiwan with the Nationalist government, he once obtained a passport with Republic of China and re-entered China as a citizen of Taiwan.
In the 1970s, after he graduated from secondary school at the age of 16, he was forced to go to the countryside of southern Ganzhou. In the spring of 1975, with the help of Chen Yifei, he moved to the suburbs of Nanjing and settled down there. During this period, his completed works include Writing a Letter to Chairman Mao (a painting that expresses the aspiration of youths to stay in rural area), and Tibetan themed painting Tears Flooding the Autumnal Fields, together with a number of oil paintings and Lianhuanhua works on the topic of Chinese Civil War. Well known within the artistic community, his sketches were imitated by his peers.
With the restoration of the National Higher Education Entrance Examination in 1978 after the ending of the Cultural Revolution, Chen Danqing was admitted to the oil paintings department of China Central Academy of Fine Arts as a graduate student. He stayed and taught at the school after his graduation in 1980. In the same year, his graduation work, the Tibetans paintings (西èÂÂç»Âç»), a series of seven realist oil paintings, earned Chen a nation-wide fame "almost overnight".
In 1982, Chen moved to New York City and lived there for 18 years writing and painting. Chen was represented exclusively by Wally Findlay Galleries in New York, Palm Beach, Beverly Hills and Paris.
Chen returned to China in 2000 as a professor and doctoral supervisor at Tsinghua University, Academy of Arts & Design. In October 2004, after publicly criticizing the schoolâÂÂs rigid admissions and curricula, he resigned from Tsinghua University.
Chen has published several essay collections including Random Notes from New York (纽约çÂÂè®°, 2000), Chen's Music Notes (éÂÂ丹éÂÂé³ä¹Âç¬Âè®°, 2002), The Excess Material (å¤Âä½ÂçÂÂç´ æÂÂ, 2003), Backward Steps (éÂÂæÂ¥éÂÂ, 2004), Backward Steps Continued (éÂÂæÂ¥éÂÂç»Âç¼Â, 2007), and The Wasted Years (èÂÂåºÂéÂÂ, 2009). Chen participated in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony as part of Zhang Yimou's design team.
Chen is well known for his Realist paintings and garnered critical acclaim for his portraits of Tibetans.
In 1976 and 1980 Chen traveled to Tibet for a total of nine months. The trip to Tibet inspired him to make a number of paintings about the ethnic minorities of the nation, including his 1976 painting Tears Flooding the Autumnal Fields, and a series of seven paintings for his graduation portfolio, later collectively known as the Tibetans paintings or the Tibetan series (西èÂÂç»Âç»). These paintings are: Mother and Child, Pilgrimage, One City, Shepherd, City of the Two, Shampoo, and Kamba Man.
The 1978 Exhibition of Nineteenth-Century French Rural Landscapes at the National Art Museum of ChinaâÂÂwhich included works by Camille Corot, Courbet, Jean-François Millet, Monet, Gauguin, Derain, and Renoir, seemed to have a substantial impact on Chen. It was the first large-scale French art exhibition in the People's Republic of China, offering Chinese artists a close encounter with academic European realism. Inspired by the small-scale canvases in that show, Chen chose to paint his Tibetan Series on similarly modest surfaces, in contrast to the monumental âÂÂgrand scenesâ typical in Chinese painting at the time. In his graduation thesis accompanying the Tibetan Series, Chen cited influence and his admiration for European painters Rembrandt, Camille Corot, Jean-Francois Millet, and Arkady Plastov, for their refined and humanistic portrayals of everyday life with emotional depth. He portrayed the Tibetans in a dignified, forthright way, avoiding the patronizing depictions of ethnic minorities common at the time.
The Tibetans paintings signaled a shift from propagandaâÂÂdriven Social Realism to a modern realist style influenced by nineteenthâÂÂcentury European Realism artists. This series redirected focuses from SovietâÂÂinspired realism to classical European realism within Chinese oil painting, portraying everyday life in an earthy, sober, and unheroic manner.
The Tibetans paintings were considered an important milestone in the turning of China's artistic landscape in the early 1980s amid the Reform and opening up. At the Beijing Poly 2021 Spring Auction, one of the paintings titled Shepherds was sold at a price of RMB 161 million (approx. USD 22 million). This painting shows the moment of a kiss between two Tibetan shepherds, an intimate theme rarely explored during that era. The Tibetans paintings remains Chen 's most iconic body of work. While it established his fame, it also seemed to have haunted his careerâÂÂfrequently cited by critics as his creative peak.
After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Chen developed a series of largeâÂÂscale diptychs and triptychs that blend realist history painting with installationâÂÂstyle presentation. He conceived âÂÂcopyingâ as a selfâÂÂstanding visual language, arranging paired panelsâÂÂeach linking a Tiananmen image with scenes drawn from mass media or art historyâÂÂto create openâÂÂended juxtapositions. Works such as the 1991 diptych Street Theater guide the viewer through matched compositional elements (vanishing points, mirrored gestures, selective color accents) to evoke themes of upheaval, nationalism, and historical uncertainty. Although rooted in nineteenthâÂÂcentury European realism, these installations recall monumental works like GéricaultâÂÂs Raft of the Medusa and RembrandtâÂÂs The Night Watch, while engaging lateâÂÂtwentiethâÂÂcentury themes of appropriation, mediaâÂÂmediated memory, and the âÂÂangel of historyâ concept popularized by Walter Benjamin.
In 1995, Chen completed Stillâ¯Life, a tenâÂÂpanel installation each 2â¯meters high and together spanning 15â¯meters in length. Although entitled Stillâ¯Life, the workâÂÂs scale, linkedâÂÂpanel format and thematic complexity align it with contemporary installation practice rather than traditional tabletop stillâÂÂlife painting.
2010, Yang Feiyun and Chen Danqing planned two major art exhibitions â "Back to the Sketch (Ã¥ÂÂå°åÂÂçÂÂ)," and "In the Face of the Original Code (Ã¥ÂÂÃ¥ÂÂÃ¥ÂÂå ¸)".
Localâ¯Perspective (å±Âé¨,â¯jubu) is a Chinese documentary series hosted by Chenâ¯Danqing and coâÂÂproduced by Vistopia (çÂÂçÂÂæ³,â¯kanlixiang) and Youku. Seasons one (2015) and two (2018) together garnered over 110â¯million views and Douban ratings of 9.5 and 9.4.
The third season, The Great Artisansâ¯âÂÂâ¯Italian Renaissance Frescoes, premiered on Januaryâ¯8,â¯2020, and was the most extensively prepared. In 2017, Chen spent three months in Florence researching churches and monasteries. In 2018, he recapped his knowledge on Renaissance art history, and spent more than ten days to writing each episodeâÂÂs script. In 2019, the production team secured permissions to film on location at dozens of religious sites in Italy.
The season spotlights Renaissance fresco artists often overshadowed by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo â Giotto, Masolino da Panicale, Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi, Filippino Lippi, and many more anonymous artisans â asserting that the RenaissanceâÂÂs scope cannot be measured by its most celebrated names alone. Through close study of fresco cycles at the Basilica of Saintâ¯Francis in Assisi, Santaâ¯Maria dellaâ¯Scala in Siena, and the MediciâÂÂRiccardi Chapel in Florence, the series restores these artists to prominence and reveals the cultural richness of a medium often confined to the margins. Leaving out specialist jargon, the program unfolds in ChenâÂÂs personal voice, augmented by modern filming techniques and diverse visual materials under director Xieâ¯Mengxi and a team of young filmmakers. Writer Jiangâ¯Fangzhou praised ChenâÂÂs sincerity in presenting art for its own sake. At the Beijing launch, Chen recalled his years in remote countrysideâÂÂwhen art reached him only by chanceâÂÂand affirmed his wish to make art appreciation accessible on every smartphone. Published in 2020 as The Great Artisansâ¯âÂÂâ¯Italian Renaissance Frescoes, the scripts include ChenâÂÂs travel photographs and reflective annotations.