CHEN FEI

Early Years

Born in Hongtong County, Shanxi Province, Chen Fei studied at the Fine Art Department of the Beijing Film Academy, graduating in 2005. His academic training in film is a defining influence on his artistic practice—his paintings often resemble frames from an imaginary movie, where narrative and composition are precisely constructed.

Chen lives and works in Beijing, where he is part of a generation of artists redefining contemporary Chinese painting by drawing from both traditional techniques and global pop references.

Artworks

Chen Fei’s artworks are characterised by hyper-realistic technique, luminous colour palettes and a cinematic sensibility that captures moments suspended between humour, desire and menace.

Cinematic Realism and Early Works

Chen Fei’s early paintings demonstrate a keen cinematic eye, cultivated during his training at the Beijing Film Academy. Works like The Meat Murder (2005) and I Am Not Your Friend (2008) depict exaggerated, often violent self-portraits that recall stills from psychological thrillers. These paintings are not only technically accomplished but conceptually provocative—exploring themes of emotional alienation, performative masculinity and social estrangement through hyper-realistic figures and tightly composed mise-en-scène. Rendered with a glossy, near-photographic finish, they blur the lines between reality and fiction, offering early insight into the artist’s obsession with control, fantasy and the artifice of representation.

Pop Culture and Personal Mythology

Throughout the 2010s, Chen Fei developed a painterly language that freely mixed elements of pop culture, youth subcultures and personal iconography. In works like Bad Friends Series (2011) and I’m Crazy About You (2015), comic book aesthetics collide with eroticised still-life arrangements and surreal portraiture. Characters drawn from manga, martial arts films, and anime inhabit exaggerated domestic scenes, punctuated by meat, fruit, sneakers and body parts. While often humorous and seductively detailed, these paintings convey a darker psychology beneath their glossy surfaces—critiquing consumerism, voyeurism, and the fragmentation of identity in a world saturated with visual excess and stylised performance.

Art Historical References

In more recent years, Chen Fei has increasingly woven art historical references into his work, layering his compositions with nods to European painting traditions while maintaining his distinctive visual language. In Do Not Disturb (2019), a reclining nude evokes Titian’s Venus of Urbino or Manet’s Olympia, but the setting—a sterile hotel room cluttered with soda cans, a smartphone and takeaway boxes—displaces any classical idealism. These paintings do not merely quote the past; they satirise it, reframing canonical poses through the lens of millennial ennui. By fusing East-West visual traditions, Chen challenges the hierarchies of taste and authority embedded in the history of art.

Psychological Tension and Formal Control

Underlying Chen Fei’s work is a pervasive sense of psychological tension. His figures often appear frozen mid-gesture, their expressions detached, their bodies too perfect, their surroundings too composed. Paintings such as Every Happy Family (2020) depict domestic scenes that border on the uncanny: families dining in silence, pets observing like sentinels, knives and forks aligned with military precision. The hyperreal clarity of the scenes intensifies their emotional ambiguity, creating a palpable unease. For Chen, formal control is not only an aesthetic strategy but a thematic one—expressing the pressures of conformity, repression and self-surveillance within contemporary life and visual culture.

Exhibitions

Chen Fei has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.

Solo Exhibitions

• Father and child, The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2025)
• Grand Lobby, Le Consortium Museum, Dijon (2025)
• Morning Market, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2021)
• Stranger, Today Art Museum, Beijing (2011)
• Chen Fei Solo Oil Painting Exhibition, Beijing Film Academy, Beijing (2004)

Group Exhibitions

• The Decameron, ZHI Foundation, Beijing (2205)
• China, a new generation of artists, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2024)
• New Artistic Styles Of Contemporary Painting, National Art Museum Of China, Beijing (2024)
• Looking at the Stars, G Museum, Nanjing (2023)
• On Sabbatical, West Bund Museum, Shanghai (2020)
• Painting as Strait Gate: Post-80s Artists Invitation Exhibition, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016)

Instagram

Chen Fei’s Instagram can be found here.

Critical Reception

Chen Fei’s practice has been featured in leading publications including Artsy and The Financial Times.

Chen Fei FAQs

Ocula | 2025