Chen Danqing
Chen Danqing (born 1953) is Chinese-American artist, art critic and author of multiple books and essays.
An internationally acclaimed realism painter, Danqing is one of China’s finest artists from the Cultural Revolution. A graduate of China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, he is best known for his earlier works of socialist realism, the ‘Tibetan paintings’. Chen Danqing is often described as an artist with a social conscience, who injected humanity into his works produced during China’s Cultural Revolution of the late 1970s.
In 1982, he departed for New York, where he lived for eighteen years. New York, in Danqing’s own words, exposed him to ample Western artistic influences and gave him the courage to venture out creatively. His Tiananmen series started a life-long narrative of ‘dislocation’. In this series, he juxtaposes contrasting images of the actual happenings with Western portrayals of the same.
Upon his return to China in 2000, he took a doctoral supervisor position at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Chen Danqing was a consultant to the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening ceremony committee, creating the prose for the Book of Zhang.
In 2014, Chen Danqing teamed up with Liu Shan for his ‘Still Life—Chen Danqing’ exhibition at the Suzhou Museum in China.
As an author of titles such as ‘Chen Danqing Ai WeiWei: Non-Arts Interview’ (1991), ‘Art Book as Still Life’ (1998), ‘Talk with Chen Danqing’ (2009), ‘Essay Collection of Chen Danqing’ (2014), ‘Unfamiliar Experience’ (2015) and many other published works, he is a frequent participant in social and art debates in China and the West.
In 2011, he was awarded an honorary professorship at the School of Humanities at Zhejiang University in China. In 2013, he was a recipient of the Lucie Foundation award. Danqing’s works are widely collected by international museums and institutions in China and the West (Hong Kong University of Science and Arts Centre, Harvard University, Wally Findlay Galleries International, China’s Art Gallery, Military Museum of the Chinese Revolution and more). Chen Danqing is the epitome of modern-day Chinese literati.