Chen Ke

Chen Ke was born in 1978 in Tongjiang, Sichuan province, China. She studied at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (also referred to as the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts) in Chongqing, earning a BA in Oil Painting in 2002 and an MFA in Oil Painting in 2005. Before turning fully to painting, she worked in photography and video, participating in several regional exhibitions in Chengdu, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Pingyao in 2001 and 2002.

Her national profile rose in 2007 through a partnership between Beijing's Star Gallery and Italy's Marella Gallery, which presented her solo exhibition With You, I Will Never Feel Lonely. Her series The Girl Who Was..., made between 2005 and 2008 and shown at Galerie Urs Meile, established the girl-and-doll imagery that became a recurring motif in her work, used to explore memory, identity, and the private interior life of a generation raised amid China's rapid social change.

In the 2010s and 2020s her practice expanded into a body of work reinterpreting the women associated with the Bauhaus movement, shown as Bauhaus Gal, Room at Perrotin Shanghai in 2021 and as Bauhaus Gals, Theatre at Perrotin Paris in 2023 and 2024, her gallery debut in France. In 2025, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing presented Chen Ke, Bauhaus Unknown, a survey of more than sixty works built around this Bauhaus material. She lives and works in Beijing.

Institutional and market coverage frames Chen Ke as a painter who works through inherited images rather than pure invention, taking fragments of personal biography, girlhood iconography, and art history, most recently the Bauhaus, and folding them into an idiosyncratic visual language. Her early recognition came through the 2007 Star Gallery and Marella Gallery partnership and her acclaimed The Girl Who Was... series at Galerie Urs Meile, work read at the time as an intimate counterpoint to the more monumental, historically weighted painting associated with some of her Chinese contemporaries. Her later Bauhaus Gal project, shown across Perrotin's Shanghai and Paris spaces before its 2025 UCCA survey in Beijing, has been described in gallery and museum materials as an attempt to recover women largely excluded from the Bauhaus's dominant historical narrative, continuing her longstanding interest in memory, women's interior lives, and the rewriting of received history through painting.

Chen Ke's auction record is Matador, a 2006 painting that sold for RMB 9,085,000 (approximately USD 1.25 million) at Yongle Auction in Beijing in 2023, roughly tripling its high estimate. The same painting had previously sold at Poly Auction Macau in 2016 for about USD 258,395, so the 2023 result also marks a significant appreciation for a single tracked work. In the 2023 Hurun China Art List, Chen Ke ranked 37th among the 100 artists surveyed and was described as the top-ranking female artist on that list. She is represented by Perrotin, which has organized several of her recent solo exhibitions.

Chen Ke's market is still relatively young at auction: her current record was set in 2023, on a single closely tracked painting, and her broader secondary-market history is thinner than her institutional profile might suggest. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification rest largely on her gallery, Perrotin, and on the exhibition and collection record built up through institutions such as the Sigg Collection, Museum Voorlinden, the Franks-Suss Collection, the Yuz Museum, and the Long Museum. For a collector, that institutional footprint is the strongest signal of durability, while the limited depth of her auction history is the main reason to treat any single result, including her current record, with some caution.