David Chen
Hot of the press and just released is DAVID CHEN'S new book featuring many of his paintings. Arrived at the gallery today the book is a pictorial diary showcasing some of David's paintings over the last few years. Forty eight pages filled with beautiful paintings and sure to delight whose appreciate this very talented artist's work. OUR COPIES have been signed by David ...Don't delay! The book is priced at $40 PLUS Post and Handling A perfect gift and just right for the coffee table Contact the gallery on 03 9598 9588 to place your order or email by return and we will send you an order form.
Born in China in 1961, David studied at Nanjing College of Art and Nanjing Teachers University from 1981 to 1988, attaining a Bachelor and a Masters degree in Fine Arts - he is also a qualified art teacher. In 1988 he was art editor of the People’s Fine Art Publishing House in Beijing, and by 1989 the political climate was such that his art career was in jeopardy. However, he emerged from those difficulties to rise to national and international acclaim, and in 1991 he was one of 100 representative Chinese artists on a worldwide travelling exhibition. Prior to immigrating to Australia, in 1992 he won the ‘Silver Hawk Award’ at the Fourth International Art Contest in Nice, France, and then in 1993 was invited into the ‘10 contemporary Chinese watercolour painters’ exhibition in Hong Kong. His paintings have been shown at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1994, and his works are held in private and corporate collections worldwide. He is known for his penchant for placing figures in the landscape or the naked female form in a room, with such delicacy and harmony that one feels as if one is actually witnessing a real life happening. Regardless of his picture’s size, he cleverly reveals an intimacy and interdependence between human beings and their environment that is at once revelatory and touching. David’s paintings are the distillation of an optimistic vision of art and culture where beauty is not anathema, excellence in painterly execution is not the enemy, and purity of colour attains the spiritual role of transporting one out of mundane routine – his paintings are a joy to behold.




David Chen
M.A. (Fine Arts), B.A. (Fine Arts), Grad. Dip. Art Edn


While Chinese-born David Chen’s artistic credentials are impeccable, including winning the Silver Hawke Award at the Fourth International Art Contest in Nice in 1992, it is his uncanny ability to fuse the landscape and the human form in pictorial harmony that rivets the eye and spellbinds the viewer, setting him apart as an artist of illusionist mastery.

His classical style and technical skill, manifesting in sweeping flickering descriptive brush strokes, deep perspective minus the expected constricting vanishing points, and a refreshing use of abstract colour tonality, secures him a rare place in the Australian contemporary art world.

David’s is a painterly approach where the picture’s subject and the painter’s process are fused into a “figurative approximation” where all superfluous detail is removed by the rendering only of essentials to reveal an evocative yet mysterious atmosphere of scintillating light emanating from the painting’s inner dynamic.

Unusually, the observer becomes at once involved in the intimacy of a private moment’s reflection captured as the painting’s subject and the beautifully sensual rhythmic forms of musical brush strokes becoming objects; a lyrical delight most evident in such refined impressionistic work.

It is as if David has found a way to paint the romance and poetry of our lives with meaning, sophistication, artistry and intellect.

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