Chen Fei

Chen Fei was born in 1983 in Hongtong, in China's Shanxi Province. He trained at the Beijing Film Academy's Fine Arts Department, graduating in 2005, an education that mixed European oil-painting technique with the collectivist visual habits of Chinese art-school training. He has said that a 2009 solo exhibition at Star Gallery in Beijing marked the real start of his professional career.

His gallery career expanded through the 2010s with solo shows at Perrotin's Hong Kong (2014), Paris (2017), and New York (2019) spaces, and at Galerie Urs Meile in Lucerne and Beijing (2016). Institutional recognition followed: a 2021 solo exhibition, Morning Market, at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and Grand Lobby at Le Consortium in Dijon, described in the art press as his first institutional solo exhibition in Europe. A solo show opened at Tokyo's Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in 2025, and Perrotin Tokyo has announced Sometimes, a solo exhibition running from mid-July to late August 2026. He lives and works in Beijing.

Note for provenance research: there is a second, unrelated artist also named Chen Fei, born in Guangdong in 1972 and working in sculptural and installation forms, whose work appears in the White Rabbit Collection in Sydney. That artist should not be confused with the painter profiled here.

Chen Fei is generally discussed as a representative figure of China's post-80s painters, a generation shaped by the one-child policy and the country's fast economic rise, and known for narrative figurative paintings that draw on film and popular culture. His trajectory, from a 2009 Beijing gallery debut to a first European institutional solo, is treated in the press primarily as a case of accelerating institutional validation. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is quoted here.

Chen Fei's auction record is Stars Pile Up All Over The Sky, a diptych that sold for RMB 8,740,000 (reported at roughly USD 1.21 million) at China Guardian Auctions in Beijing on 18 November 2023, setting his personal auction high. Other tracked auction results have come in well below that figure, reflecting a thin and still-developing secondary market. His secondary market remains small in volume relative to his rising institutional profile, so individual results should be read in that context rather than as evidence of a deep, liquid market.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Chen Fei, and his market is anchored almost entirely by Perrotin, his representing gallery; buyers should rely on gallery and auction house provenance records rather than any certificate program. His auction history is short and concentrated in a handful of sales, so his 2023 record price should be treated as a single strong data point rather than a stable trend line. Collectors researching him should also take care to distinguish this painter, born in 1983 in Shanxi, from a different, unrelated artist who shares the name Chen Fei and works in sculpture and installation.