Chen Danqing


Chen Danqing is a Chinese-American artist, writer, and art critic. He is well known for his realist paintings of Tibetans. Chen graduated from China Central Academy of Fine Arts. Because his grandfather moved to Taiwan with the Nationalist government, he also had citizenship in the Republic of China. He moved to the United States in the 1982 and became a citizen there.

Life

Chen Danqing's family home is Taishan, Guangdong province. He started learning oil painting in secondary school, and acquainted himself with young artists like Chen Yifei and Xia Baoyuan.

Time in China

In the 1970s, after he graduated from his secondary school at the age of 16 and was forced to go to the countryside of southern Ganzhou. Later, 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", "Tears Flooding the Autumnal Fields
", and 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 and later scholars.
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 thesis work, "Tibetan Paintings", received much wider recognition than any of his previous works, making Chen a noteworthy Chinese artist.

Moving to the U.S.

In 1982, Chen moved to New York City, United States, to be a professional painter. In the early 1980s, Chen painted in the Socialist Realist style and was at one stage described by the government as the most talented oil painter in China. Beginning with his series of paintings about Tibetans in the mid-1980s, Chen began to lose official support for his work. Chen was represented exclusively by Wally Findlay Galleries in New York, Palm Beach, Beverly Hills and Paris. Influenced by French Realist Jean-Francois Millet, his Tibetans series had a tremendous influence on the emerging Native Soil Painting movement. This new work departed from the size of his earlier Socialist Realist painting in favor of the intimate style and scale of the nineteenth-century French naturalists. He portrayed the Tibetans in a dignified, forthright way, avoiding the patronizing depictions of ethnic minorities common at the time. Chen's later work retained the sharp, realistic qualities of the Tibetan series, and has often focused on portrayals of young women.

Returning from the U.S. to China

Chen returned to China in 2000 as a professor at Tsinghua University Academy of Fine Arts and doctoral supervisor.
In October 2004, because of dissatisfaction with enrollment system, he resigned from Tsinghua Academy.
Chen has published essays "New York Suo ji ", "Chen Music Notes ", "The Extra Material ", "Step Backwards Set, "Collection of Serial on the Back, "Waste Collection " on education and urban problems.
Chen participated in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony with planning, design, and creating prose written in the book of zhang.

Description of artwork

Chen is well known for his Realist paintings and garnered critical acclaim for his portraits of Tibetans. His earliest artwork from the 1970s included sketches, and Chen learned oil painting in secondary school. In 1976, he traveled to Tibet, the place where has a significant influence to his future art developments. The trip to Tibet inspired him to make a number of paintings about the ethnic minorities of the nation.

Tibetan paintings

In 1978, Chen Danqing was admitted to the Central Academy of Painting graduate classes. In 1980, he created a stack of seven paintings and sketches as a graduation creation in Tibet. These paintings are: Mother and Child, Pilgrimage, One City, Shepherd, City of the Two, Shampoo, and Kamba Man. Later convention to collectively as "Tibetan paintings."
The "Tibetan paintings," caused a great shock in the art community. The "Tibetan paintings" continue to get attention, commentary, research, and renowned at home and abroad.
"Tibetan paintings," are recognized as China realist paintings, distinct from the former Soviet influence. Meanwhile, the "Tibetan paintings" focus on the vision side, non-heroic, non-themed real life.

''Still Life''

In 1995, Chen completed a set of 15 meters long and two meters high ten-linked painting Still Life, a contemporary installation art.
Chen Danqing returned to China in 2000 and took his students to go to the Beijing Road Village painting farmers, veterans, to underground mine workers. He always insisted on painting in a realistic style.
2010, Yang Feiyun and Chen Danqing planned two major art exhibitions - "Back to the Sketch," and "In the Face of the Original Code".

Artwork

Group exhibition

· Army Art Exhibition

· National Art Exhibition

· Central Academy of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition

· People's Republic of China Art Exhibition

· Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition

· Group Show

· China Five Thousand Years of Civilization Art Exhibition

· Twentieth Century Neoclassical Retrospective

· China Dialogue Exhibition of Contemporary German Art

· The Original Image Ⅱ · Contemporary Works on Paper Exhibition

· Art and War

· Feel · Memory

· Century Spirit · Chinese Contemporary Art Masters

· Art and China's Revolution

· Doran 5 years · Chinese Contemporary Art Retrospective

· Very status · Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition of Twelve Masters

· Chinese Painting Exhibition of artists of the twentieth century

· Original Song 2011 Summer Exhibition

· Khe Qingyuan · Chinese New Painting

· Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art History · Painting articles

· Transformation of Chinese History, Art 2000-2009

· Spirit and History

· 2010 Offshore Oil Painting · Sculpture Exhibition of Famous

· Track and Qualitative · Beijing Film Academy 60th Anniversary Exhibition

· Youth · Youth Narrative Painting Exhibition

· Love and Hope - Support Japan affected children

· Visual Memory

· Four Decades of Stories · Time Friendship Art

· Integrate the New Extension - Returned Overseas Artists Painting Exhibition

· Group Jane Meta · National Ten Art Museum Exhibition

· The 55th Venice Biennale · Parallel Exhibition "Heart Beat"

Solo exhibition

· Chen Danqing Exhibition My Paintings and Tibet

· Chen Danqing Exhibition

· Chen Danqing Oil Painting Exhibition

· Chen Danqing Exhibition

· Chen Danqing 1968-1999 Sketch Painting Exhibition

· Chen Danqing Print Exhibition

· Chen Danqing Returned Years

Curatorial

· Back to Painting

· In the Face of the Original Code

· Shanghai Notepad · 1960 Photo Exhibition

· Tracer One Hundred Bridge Picture Show

Collections

· Military Museum of the Chinese Revolution

· Jiangsu Provincial Art Museum

· China Art Gallery

· Central Academy of Fine Arts

· Harvard University

· Wally Findlay Galleries International, Inc.
· Europe, the Americas, Asia dozens of agencies, collectors

Paintings

· Chen Danqing Sketch

· Chen Danqing Sketch Collection

· Chen Danqing Paintings

· Chen Danqing Album · Still Life

· Chen Danqing Sketch Collection

· Chen Danqing 1968-1999 Sketch Painting Collection

· Chen Danqing Contemporary Artists Series

· Chen Danqing Returned a Decade Painting Sketch

· Chen Danqing Sketch Painting