Lu Yifei

Lu Yifei was born in 1908 in Changshu, Jiangsu province. He specialized in huaniao hua, the flower and bird genre of Chinese ink painting, rendered in ink and color on paper and silk, with peonies a recurring subject.

After 1949 he became a professor and postgraduate tutor at the China Academy of Art, then based in Hangzhou, and held senior roles at two allied Hangzhou institutions: Deputy Dean of the Xiling Academy of Painting and Calligraphy and Adviser to the Xiling Society of Seal Arts. He was also Honorary President of the Changshu Academy of Calligraphy and Painting in his home city. His formal art training, if any, is not documented in the sources available for this profile.

Lu Yifei died in 1997. Available sources confirm the year but not an exact date or place of death; no obituary or institutional death notice with those details could be located.

English-language critical commentary on Lu Yifei is thin. The fullest available biographical account, an auction-house profile from SoWAs, describes him as "a well-known Chinese modern painter and outstanding art educator." No verbatim assessment from a named critic in a major art publication could be located and confirmed, so none is quoted here. His inclusion in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection is itself a form of institutional recognition beyond the Chinese academic and auction-market context in which he is otherwise documented.

No single, verifiable all-time auction record for Lu Yifei could be confirmed. MutualArt's aggregate auction data lists 637 of his works as having come to auction, with realized prices reported up to roughly USD 324,893 for works on paper and roughly USD 159,561 for paintings, but these are summary figures rather than a documented single lot with a title, sale house, and date, so they should be read as a general market ceiling rather than a record. His work is not known to be represented by any gallery or estate, and it trades almost entirely on the secondary market, concentrated in Chinese and Hong Kong sales of traditional ink painting.

Collectors should treat Lu Yifei as a historical, deceased painter with an active but modest secondary market rather than a gallery-supported living or estate-managed practice. There is no catalogue raisonne and no authentication body beyond ordinary auction-house connoisseurship, so provenance, seals, and inscriptions carry unusual weight. Because his name is shared, in different romanizations and different Chinese characters, with a contemporary living artist and with the actress Liu Yifei, buyers and researchers should confirm they are looking at works by the painter born in 1908 in Changshu, Jiangsu, and not at a different, unrelated figure.