Artist with flowering talent

Chen entered his prime time in art in 1974 and produced dozens of paintings, showing mastery with technique and the formation of his personal style. Works from that period are a highlight of the ongoing exhibition.

Despite heart trouble from time to time, Chen could travel to different areas of Sichuan, and established a style to present the ethereal atmosphere of the scenery before his eyes.

"Chen always reinforced in his work that the most important thing about art was sincerity, not fame," Tao says. "The mountains, terraces and folk customs of Sichuan formed a never-exhausting source of inspiration for him."

Many of his paintings were done on Jiajiang paper, an established brand of handmade material from Jiajiang, a county at the foot of Mount Emei, where the fine papermaking tradition dated to the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Chen believed the special paper accentuated the mood he wanted to deliver in his artworks.

Except for the commissions Chen undertook, his paintings are largely no more than 50 centimeters in length and width, mainly because he couldn't afford paper of bigger sizes. Even so, he tried to show the best of his brushwork.

"One can't call himself an artist if he isn't able to leverage his mind to a level to understand the unity of universe and all lives," Chen once said. "A small painting can as well reveal the vastness of an artist."

An exhibition of Chen's art at the National Art Museum of China in 1988 first introduced his accomplishments to a wider audience in Beijing, while the current show provides a glimpse of the deepening research into his career over the years.

Tao says Chen is a figure evoking excitement among those interested in 20th-century Chinese art, and whose work defines the openness and breadth of Chinese painting.