Cheng-Wu Fei was born in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China in 1911 and entered the College of Fine Art at the National Central University in Nanking in 1930, studying under the supervision of Chinese painting master Xu Beihong. Moving to London in 1946 for further art education abroad, in 1947 he obtained a British Council scholarship to study for three years at the Slade School of Art. In 1953, he and his wife, Chien-Ying Chang decided to settle permanently in London, rather than return to Communist China; in England, Fei's works were widely exhibited and collected and his 1956 textbook on Chinese painting adopted by many UK art colleges.
Painter and art educator Cheng-Wu Fei was born in Suzhou, China in 1914. He entered the College of Fine Art at the National Central University, Nanking in 1930, studying under Chinese painting master Xu Beihong. There he met his future wife, Chien-Ying Chang (1913-2004), who was also a painter. In 1935, he was invited by Yan Wenliang to teach oil painting at Suzhou Academy of Fine Art. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Fei moved to Chongqing with Xu and was appointed Associate Professor at the College of Fine Art at the National Central University, Nanking.
Under the auspices of Xu, who was on the board of directors of the Sino-British Boxer Indemnity, Fei and Chang, along with Xu's two other students, Zhang Anzhi and Chen Xiaonan, were recommended to the Nanking National Government to be sent to England for further fine arts education in 1946. At the time, they became the only publicly funded students of Chinese painting after Xu. In London, Fei was at first attached to Camberwell School of Art and the Courtauld Institute, while Chang attended Chelsea School of Art (Patrick Wright, Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao's China, p. 232). In 1947, the couple held their first joint exhibition at the China Institute, which brought offers of places from Professor Randolph Schwabe, director of the Slade School of Art. Both obtained British Council scholarships to train at the Slade for three years until 1950. Studying under William Coldstream and Stanley Spencer, the couple could often be seen practising their sketches on the streets of London. Fei and Chang's 1947 exhibition won Spencer's acclaim and he became a close friend of the couple, attending their marriage in 1953; he also sat to Fei and painted several portraits of Chang. In 1948 Fei's work was shown in the art competition at the London Summer Olympics. Although he studied Western painting at the Slade (including the English masters, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner (Wright. p. 233)), Fei decided to abandon it in favour of his traditional Chinese style, painting flowers, bamboo leaves, and birds. In one of Fei’s typical works, published as a greeting card by the Medici Society, a squirrel is caught springing along a narrow bough; another shows a sparrow landing on a sprig of bamboo.
In 1950, Xu wrote to mobilise Fei and Chang to return to China, expressing his new ambition for art, 'Cheng-Wu's paintings have made great progress, but China needs someone who can compose large paintings at this time, which is to try realism (socialist realism) and choose subjects such as combats and production' (‘Xu Beihong: In the Tide of a New Era’, Shi Ji Feng Cai, No. 11, 2007, p. 25 (translated from the Chinese by Hui Li, January 2022). However, Fei considered that these subjects were not compatible with traditional Chinese painting techniques (Guo Hua). After Fei and Chang were married at Kensington Registry Office on 27 March 1953, Fei decided to settle permanently with Chang in London, where he remained until his death. In the same year, Fei's self-portrait appeared on the front of Art News and Review, as part of a project, conceived by Bernard Denvir, the magazine's first editor, and which ran between 1949 and 1959, illustrating covers with self-portraits by living artists, often accompanied by a related article.
Moving to Finchley, north London, Fei and Chang established a reputation in the local art society, based on their sophisticated Chinese ink painting. In his adopted homeland, Fei became a respected master across the techniques of oil painting, watercolour, drawing, and Chinese painting; his works, characterised by strength and boldness, were vivid and life-like. In 1950, Picture Post printed his rendering of a pastoral landscape near Westerham, Kent, in which pines and willows seem like oriental transplants, and an electricity pylon stands bereft of all cables, like a crude Western imitation of a Chinese pagoda. His technical mastery was further exemplified in the textbook he published in 1956, Brush Drawing in the Chinese Manner, which was adopted in UK art schools. Fei also participated regularly in annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Arts and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, and his Waters Meet, Lynmouth, North Devon was shown at a Royal Academy touring exhibition in 1954. Fei's works were presented by prestigious London galleries, particularly during the 1950s, including the Leicester Galleries, Redfern, and Roland, Browse and Delbanco (the latter co-founded by émigré art dealer, Gustav Delbanco), where they appealed to British collectors, including orientalist, William (Billy) Wilberforce Winkworth (Wright, p. 232). Fei's works were also collected or shown by institutions such as the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the Royal West of England Academy (which featured his work posthumously in its exhibition Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art (2019-20)). Cheng-Wu Fei died in London, England in 2000. According to their wishes, Fei's and Chang's ashes were scattered close to their north London home, in front of the magnolias of Kenwood House, Hampstead. Fei's work is held in UK public collections including the Ashmolean, Oxford and Tate Archive, London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Cheng-Wu Fei]
Publications related to [Cheng-Wu Fei] in the Ben Uri Library