Chen Cheng-Po

Chen Cheng-Po was born on 2 February 1895 in Chiayi, Taiwan, then under Japanese colonial administration. He enrolled in the teacher training program at the Taiwan Governor-General's National Language School in Taipei in the 1910s, completing it around 1917, and studied Western-style watercolor painting there under Kinichiro Ishikawa. After several years teaching, he traveled to Japan in 1924 to enter the Normal Education Division in Painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, now Tokyo University of the Arts, and privately studied under the painter Okada Saburosuke at his Hongo Painting Institute. He completed his graduate studies there in 1929.

In 1926, while still a student, his painting Street of Chiayi was selected for the 7th Imperial Art Exhibition (Teiten) in Tokyo, the first time a Taiwanese artist's Western-style oil painting had been chosen for that official Japanese exhibition. After graduating in 1929 he moved to Shanghai to teach at Xinhua Art University and other schools. In 1933 he was selected as one of twelve artists representing the Republic of China at the Chicago World's Fair, where his painting Qing Liu was exhibited. He returned to Taiwan in the early 1930s and in 1934 co-founded the Taiyang Fine Arts Association with Yen Shiu-long, Li Mei-shu, Li Shih-chiao, and other leading painters.

After the end of Japanese rule in 1945, Chen became active in local politics in Chiayi. During the February 28 Incident of 1947, a nationwide uprising against Kuomintang rule, he volunteered as a civilian negotiator between Chiayi residents and the incoming Nationalist military. He was arrested and, on 25 March 1947, publicly executed in front of Chiayi's train station, his body left on display for three days before his wife recovered it. His death is documented in Taiwan's Ministry of Culture records and in major press accounts, including a detailed Taipei Times feature. His reputation was largely suppressed during the subsequent decades of martial law and has been actively rehabilitated since the 1990s, including through the Chen Cheng-po and 228 Cultural Museum in Chiayi and, in 2025, the naming of a minor planet in his honor.

Institutional and market sources consistently credit Chen Cheng-Po as a pioneer of Western-style oil painting in Taiwan and one of the first Taiwanese artists to gain recognition within Japan's official exhibition system. Taiwan's Ministry of Culture describes him as the first Taiwanese artist whose oil paintings were selected for the Imperial Art Exhibition, and market sources, including Christie's lot notes, cite his 1926 Teiten selection and his co-founding role in the Taiyang Fine Arts Association as central to his historical standing. His paintings are read as blending rigorous Western academic training with a distinct sense of color and composition drawn from Chinese ink traditions. In the decades since his rehabilitation, museum programming, including a 2024 exhibition at the National Taiwan Museum and inclusion in the 2025 Taipei Biennial, has reinforced his status as a founding figure of Taiwanese modernism, alongside continued attention to his death as a defining episode in Taiwan's twentieth-century history.

Chen Cheng-Po's auction market is thin but capable of producing exceptional prices when major works appear. His record is Sunset at Danshui, also known as Sunset in Tamsui, which sold for HKD 50,727,500, about USD 6.5 million, at Christie's Hong Kong, though the exact sale date is not confirmed in available sources. An earlier landscape, Chiayi Park, sold for HKD 5,794,100 at a Hong Kong auction on 28 April 2002, an early sign of institutional and collector interest in his work. A separate transaction is sometimes cited alongside these results: in 2006 the painting Tamsui was reportedly sold privately to the collector Pierre Chen for about USD 4.5 million, a price widely described as a record for a Chinese-language oil painting at the time. That sale was a private transaction rather than a public auction, so it does not count toward his auction record. As of mid-2026, no later public sale has been reported to exceed the Sunset at Danshui result.

Chen Cheng-Po's market is defined by scarcity. Very few of his major paintings surface at auction, most works of quality are held in museum and family-foundation collections, and there is no published catalogue raisonne, which places extra weight on provenance and on verification through the artist's estate archives and Liang Gallery. Because sales are infrequent and concentrated in Hong Kong Asian art auctions, any single result, including his auction record, should be read as a data point from a very small sample rather than a smooth trend line. Collectors should also take care not to conflate his highest recorded auction price with the higher, but privately negotiated, 2006 sale of Tamsui, which was not a public auction transaction.