Chen Peiqiu

Chen Peiqiu was born on 29 December 1922 in Nanyang, Henan Province, China. She initially studied economics before turning to art. In 1944 she enrolled at the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, now the China Academy of Art, to study Chinese painting, training under Huang Binhong and Zheng Wuchang, and she graduated in 1950.

She married the painter and calligrapher Xie Zhiliu (1910 to 1997), and the two became one of the most recognized artist couples in modern Chinese art, working in Shanghai for the remainder of their careers. Chen was known for reviving blue-green (qinglu) landscape painting and for bird-and-flower compositions that combined traditional brushwork with bold, modern color. In late 2014 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Shanghai Art and Literature Prize. The following year, the Shanghai municipal government opened the Xie Zhiliu and Chen Peiqiu Art Gallery in Nanhui New City, Pudong, dedicated to the couple's work.

Chen Peiqiu died on 26 June 2020 at Zhongshan Hospital in Shanghai, at the age of 97.

Institutional accounts consistently place Chen Peiqiu among the leading Chinese painters of her generation. Sotheby's has described her as one of China's most famous female artists, citing a style that mixes traditional brushstrokes with a free-hand, boldly colored approach. The Hong Kong Museum of Art has described her, alongside Xie Zhiliu, as one of the leading calligrapher-painters of the Shanghai School, in connection with its 2023 to 2024 exhibition of works from the Jingguanlou Collection. No verbatim, critic-attributed quotation about her work could be confirmed in named major art press for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Chen Peiqiu was a fixture of the Chinese ink-painting auction market during her lifetime. She appeared on every edition of the Hurun Art List of best-selling living Chinese artists at auction from its inception until her death in 2020, and in 2016 she ranked 16th on that list with reported auction sales of about US$7.9 million, the highest ranking among women that year.

The best-documented single-work result is Flowers and Birds After Song Dynasty Master, which sold for USD 396,500 at Sotheby's New York on 14 September 2017. Public sources also point to a landscape painting reportedly sold for approximately US$3.4 million in 2014, a considerably higher figure, but the work's title, auction house, sale location, and exact date are not documented in accessible sources, so it cannot be confirmed as an official record. Smaller works by her, including bird-and-flower paintings, have traded at auction for far more modest sums, so her market spans a wide range, and any single data point should be checked against the underlying sale record rather than taken from a secondary summary.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Chen Peiqiu and no confirmed estate certificate-of-authenticity program. Verification of a given work depends on provenance, connoisseurship, and the records of the museums and collections associated with her paintings, including the private Jingguanlou Collection exhibited at the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the dedicated Xie Zhiliu and Chen Peiqiu Art Gallery in Shanghai. No commercial gallery or estate representative could be confirmed as of this writing, so acquisitions run through auction houses and private dealers rather than a single represented channel. Because her auction record is thinly and inconsistently documented in public sources, collectors should treat any headline price, including the reported US$3.4 million 2014 sale, as a starting point for direct verification rather than a settled fact.