Hu Yefu

Hu Yefu, sometimes romanized Hu Yefo, was born in 1908 and worked in the gongbi tradition, producing carefully rendered portraits of elegant women and figures within the broader Shanghai School of painting. He is best known for a series of illustrations after the classical novel Jin Ping Mei. One account of his life states that in the early 1950s authorities required him to surrender certain original works and prohibited him from continuing erotic subject matter, and that he kept painting despite lung cancer until his death in 1980 in Shanghai. This account comes from a single secondary source rather than a major newspaper or museum publication, and it is presented here as documented but not independently corroborated.

Public sources give only the year of his birth, without an exact date, and do not document his birthplace, formal training, or teachers. No exhibition history with named venues and years could be located.

A note on naming: the internal record used to generate this profile paired Hu Yefu's name with that of a different, earlier Chinese artist, Ding Fuzhi, born in 1879 in Hangzhou, whose death is variously dated to 1946 or 1949 depending on the source. Ding Fuzhi was a painter and seal carver, a founding member of the Xiling Seal-Carving Association, known for paintings of fruit and plum blossoms, and his work Fruit is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is a distinct historical figure from Hu Yefu and is not otherwise the subject of this profile.

No verbatim assessment from a named critic writing in a major art-press outlet could be located for Hu Yefu. Available descriptions, which come from gallery and market-adjacent writing rather than independent art criticism, consistently describe him as a celebrated painter valued for the technical control of his gongbi line work and for his figure and portrait subjects within the Shanghai School.

No verified public auction record with a confirmed price, currency, auction house, and date could be located for Hu Yefu as of 2026-07-16. His name appears in regional Chinese art auction and gallery listings, including an attributed scroll at Michaan's Auctions and a lot referenced on an Artsy auction results page, but none of the located listings publish a confirmed hammer or sale price for a specific work. One secondary account describes a set of three of his paintings once being valued at roughly the equivalent of one ounce of gold, but this is an anecdote rather than a documented auction result and should not be read as one.

Documentation for Hu Yefu is markedly thinner than for most artists tracked at this level: there is no catalogue raisonne, no confirmed auction price record, no verified exhibition history, and no identified current gallery or estate representation. His name is also easily confused, in casual references and in at least one internal data source used for this profile, with other Chinese painters of similar names and periods, including the earlier and unrelated painter Ding Fuzhi. Anyone considering a work attributed to Hu Yefu should rely on direct, work-specific connoisseurship and provenance research rather than on published market data, since no data set of sufficient rigor currently exists in the public record.