Fei Chen

Chen Fei was born in Hongdong, Shanxi in 1983. A graduate from Beijing Film Academy living and working in Beijing, his practice mainly involves easel painting. 

Chen Fei’s narrative paintings are fantastic, often perverted constructs, in which elements from his personal life are transposed into surrealistic or hyper-realistic pastiches. While he belongs to the post-1980 generation of Chinese artists raised under the one-child policy, whose overall aesthetics were influenced by mainstream culture (notably manga and anime), Chen Fei is typically concerned with the self rather than with grand history. A remarkably sharp sense of black humor informs his vibrant, ego-centred visions. Almost systematically exhibiting his own figure in his work, he satirically diverts the age-old tradition of self-portraiture to revisit Eastern and Western art-historical canons. The highly graphic quality of his lively compositions, which he envisions as film stills, playfully contrasts with the refinement of his meticulous and detail-oriented style. Further interested in how China’s rapid economic growth has impacted its now globalized culture, Chen Fei also questions his nation’s collective taste and societal evolution through his work.