Chen Danqing

Biography

Two Tibetan shepherds kissing: such a subject was almost unknown in Chinese painting in 1980. The picture “Shepherds” belongs to a series of seven small canvases that Chen Danqing painted as his graduation work for the postgraduate course at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. The series, which became known as the “Tibetan Series”, made him famous across the country almost at once.

The decisive factor, to my mind, was size. In 1978 the National Art Museum of China opened an exhibition of nineteenth-century French rural landscape painting with works by Corot, Courbet, Millet and Monet; it was the first large exhibition of French art in the People’s Republic, and Chinese artists saw academic European realism at close quarters for the first time. Following the small canvases in that show, Chen painted the Tibetan series on modest formats, although the painting of the day was expected to deliver large “grand scenes”. In his graduation thesis he named as his models Rembrandt, Corot, Millet and the Soviet painter Arkady Plastov. He portrayed the Tibetans directly and with dignity, without the condescending tone then usual in pictures of the national minorities. The series comprised “Mother and Child”, “Shepherds”, “Pilgrimage”, two canvases titled “Going to Town”, “Washing Hair” and “Khampa Man”. It is generally seen as a turn away from propagandist realism of the Soviet type towards the calm, everyday manner of the European realists of the nineteenth century.

Chen Danqing was born on 11 August 1953 in Shanghai; his family’s roots are in Taishan County, Guangdong Province. He began learning oil painting from his school art teacher, was influenced by Yan Wenliang, and in 1968 met the young painters Chen Yifei and Xia Baoyuan. In 1970, like many urban schoolchildren of the Cultural Revolution years, he was sent to the countryside, first to the south of Jiangxi Province and then, with Chen Yifei’s help, to the outskirts of Nanjing. There he painted “Writing a Letter to Chairman Mao” and “Tears Flooding the Autumnal Fields”, and told stories of the civil war in oils and in picture-story books, while his peers copied his sketches. In 1976 he went to Tibet for the first time; his two trips, in 1976 and 1980, came to nine months in all. In 1977 his work was included in the National Art Exhibition and the All-Army Art Exhibition.

In 1978, when the country restored university entrance examinations, he was admitted without a university degree to the postgraduate course of the oil painting department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied with Zhan Jianjun and Jin Shangyi. After graduating in 1980 he was kept on there to teach.

In 1982 Chen moved to New York and lived there for eighteen years: he studied at the Art Students League, wrote, and worked as a professional painter, represented by the Wally Findlay Galleries. After the events of spring 1989 in Tiananmen Square he began large diptychs and triptychs in which images of those days sit beside scenes from the press, television and art history; copying became a language in its own right for him. The diptych “Street Theater” (1991) is built this way. In 1995 he completed “Still Life”, ten panels two metres high and fifteen metres long in all, which in scale is closer to an installation than to a picture of a table with fruit. Solo exhibitions took place at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei (1995), at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (1998) and in 2000 in six Chinese cities, where his drawings and paintings of 1968–1999 were shown. In New York his work was included in “China: 5,000 Years” at the Guggenheim Museum (1998) and in “Art and China’s Revolution” at the Asia Society (2008).

In 2000 he returned to China as a professor and doctoral supervisor at the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University. In October 2004 Chen resigned, having publicly criticised the rigid admission rules and curricula, and he finally left in 2007, when six of his students had graduated. In the same years his essay collections appeared: “Random Notes from New York” (2000), “Music Notes” (2002), “The Excess Material” (2003), “Backward Steps” (2004) and its continuation (2007), “The Wasted Years” (2009). In 2006–2008 he was a member of the planning team for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, headed by Zhang Yimou.

After the death of his teacher Mu Xin in December 2011, Chen helped to found the Mu Xin Art Museum and became its director. In 2015 the first season of his video series “Local Perspective” appeared, in which he talks about art without specialist jargon, and in 2018 the second. For the third, on Italian Renaissance frescoes, he spent three months in 2017 studying the churches and monasteries of Florence, and the film crew obtained permission to shoot in dozens of Italian churches. The heroes of the season, released in January 2020, were not Leonardo and Michelangelo but Giotto, Masolino, Paolo Uccello, Filippo and Filippino Lippi and the anonymous fresco painters at Assisi, in the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena and in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi. The same year the scripts were published as a book, “The Great Artisans”, with his travel photographs and notes.