Chen Chengwei 陳承衞 China, 1984

Chen Chengwei was born in Dongtou, Zhejiang Province in 1984, is a professional artist living in Beijing. He graduated from China Academy of Art and China Oil Painting Institute successively and is one of Chinese contemporary art’s famous figurative painters. From a young age, his love for both myth and drama was apparent. In later life, he managed to nurture and then merged this love with Chinese traditional culture into his own unique form of Chinese paintings. However, he takes inspiration not just from the eats, but also from the western style of art. Surprisingly, such figurative expressionism helps his audience to easily understand the characters’ inner feelings. He insists on continuing the traditional techniques of classic oil paintings and combines his socially diverse experience to present his feelings through paintings. Sometimes his artworks seem rather abstract, however they’re not the least bit inaccessible. Thanks to his ingenious arrangements of light and unique composition of paintings, the characters’ feelings are expressed to the full. Things depicted in his paintings, though different from modern society, still manage to reflect modern people's psychological feelings to some degree, and manage to conjure up positive emotions among his audience. He prefers to stay away from the public eye and tries to develop his unique painting style from Chinese oil painting history.