Feng Xiao-Min

Feng Xiao-Min was born in November 1959 in Shanghai (his exact birth date is not documented in available sources). Accounts of his childhood describe an early and intensive art education: he reportedly began studying Chinese calligraphy around age six, moved on to classical painting, won his first art prize at eleven, and held his first exhibition in Shanghai at seventeen. He went on to study at the Academy of Fine Art in Shanghai and at a further, unnamed Fine Art School in China, completing his studies there before leaving the country.

In 1988 he moved to France and enrolled at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he continued his training, particularly in oil painting technique. He was later invited to teach at the same institution, a post he held from 1997 to 2000. He now lives and works between Paris and a studio in Fontainebleau, France, and continues to paint under the identity of a French-Chinese artist whose work is built from numbered compositions, often titled by the date of their creation.

His work is shown through Opera Gallery, which has staged solo and group exhibitions of his paintings in New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, and, in 2026, London. His own bio also lists Philippe Staib Gallery among his representatives, though this is less independently corroborated than his relationship with Opera Gallery.

Public critical writing on Feng Xiao-Min is limited mostly to gallery texts, interviews, and market profiles rather than independent reviews in major art publications. The consistent framing across these sources is that his paintings fuse Chinese calligraphic and landscape traditions with the vocabulary of Western lyrical abstraction, using color and light as the primary carriers of feeling. He was profiled by the Observer in 2025 in connection with his exhibition at Opera Gallery New York. Promotional materials for his recent Opera Gallery exhibitions, including Sailing Through the Light and Inner Horizons, consistently frame light as a central theme in his work. No verbatim assessment from a named, independent critic at a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Feng Xiao-Min's auction record is Composition N°26.4.21, which sold for about USD 391,800 at Sotheby's Hong Kong in April 2025 (the exact sale day has not been published), reported by market-data provider HENI as a new record for the artist. A separate database, MutualArt, cites a close but not identical top realized price of about USD 394,992 for a painting; that discrepancy is not resolved in available sources. Other public sales sit below the record: Christie's Hong Kong sold a 2015 canvas, "N°08.05.15," for HKD 2,016,000 at a sale that closed in May 2022, and Phillips sold a 2022 work, "No. 26.2.22," for GBP 120,650 against an estimate of GBP 80,000 to 120,000. Collectors should treat his auction history as small in volume and recent in formation, with results appearing under several name spellings, including Feng Xiao-Min, Feng Xiaomin, Xiao-Min Feng, and, in at least one database, the likely variant FENG Xiaoming.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Feng Xiao-Min, and authentication currently depends on his gallery representation and on the cataloguing of the auction houses that have sold his work, chiefly Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips. His auction record is small and recent, built mainly on Hong Kong and London sales since 2022, so any single result should be read with caution rather than as an established trend line. Because his name appears across sources in several forms, family name first or given name first, hyphenated or not, and with at least one likely database misspelling, collectors and researchers should cross-check any auction or provenance record against multiple spellings before drawing conclusions about his market.