Chien-Ying Chang was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China in 1913 and studied Fine Arts at the National Central University in Nanking, where she met her future husband, Cheng-Wu Fei. After the Second World War, Chang visited London in 1946 to study western painting, and eventually decided to stay, after the Communist takeover of China in 1949 and her marriage to Fei in England in 1953. Chang remained in England for the rest of her life, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours and the Society of Women Artists, as well as designing textiles, film costumes and murals.
Painter Chien-Ying Chang was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China in 1913. She entered the Fine Art Faculty of the National Central University in Nanking in 1930 and studied under Xu Beihong, a pioneer of 20th century Chinese art who was primarily known for his Shui-mo Hua (Chinese ink-and-wash painting) of horses. Xu's teaching of realistic painting had a profound impact on Chang and her future husband, Cheng-Wu Fei. Beyond her artistic practice, Chang also worked with Xu at the China Institute of Fine Arts in Chungking, and was unusual as a woman artist holding a position on the executive committee of the All China Artists Association (Patrick Wright, Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China, p. 232).
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 were the only publicly funded students of Chinese painting after Xu. In London, Chang was at first attached to the Chelsea School of Art (Wright, p. 232). The first joint exhibition of work by her and Fei, held in 1947, brought offers of places from Professor Randolph Schwabe, director of the Slade School of Art. In the same year the couple obtained a British Council scholarship to train at the Slade for three years. They subsequently began studying under William Coldstream and Stanley Spencer and could often be seen practising their sketches on the streets of London. The couple’s exhibition of Chinese paintings, held at the China Institute in 1947, won Spencer's acclaim, and they became close friends, with Spencer attending their registry office marriage in Kensington in 1953, after which the couple decided to settle permanently in England, rather than return to Communist China. Spencer notably painted several portraits of Chang, and in turn sat to Fei.
In her new homeland, Chang produced paintings as well as calligraphy, continuing to depict flowers, bamboo leaves, and birds in the traditional Chinese style, her freely flowing style of painting and writing reflecting her unrestrained temperament. She and Fei travelled the country, notably to Devon and to the Lake District, demonstrating the exotic arts of calligraphy and brush painting on rice paper, enchanting audiences as they conjured up trees, rocks, fishes, and waterfalls with a few swift strokes of cane-handled brushes (Wright, p. 233). Reproductions of Chang's brush and ink paintings, The Sparrows of Middlesex and Misty Morning at Bournemouth, showed that Chinese artists had long since developed a unique way of striving for reality: ‘They do not want to copy nature; but, aiming at perfection, they tried to reproduce the “essence” of the thing painted, recreating, in an imaginative way, the “spirit,” without losing the “resemblance”' (L.S. Leguin, ‘An English Summer through Chinese Eyes’, Picture Post, 12 August 1950, pp. 22-25). Strong on clouds, waterfalls and trees, she followed fellow painter Chiang Yee in finding an affinity between English mistiness and the behaviour of ink on absorbent Chinese paper. Chang also tried to bring her painting to life in a practical way, designing Chinese peony and orchid patterns for silks for the Italian textile industry, and light pink swallow and plum blossom patterns for the luxury brand Christian Dior, which were particularly popular with European women. She also created Chinese costumes for the Hollywood film, The World of Suzie Wong, and landscape murals for cruise ships (Mary Sorrell, ‘Chien-Ying Chang and Cheng-Wu Fei’, The Studio, November 1952, pp. 144-7).
During her 57 years in the UK, Chang participated regularly in annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and rose through the ranks of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, Royal West of England Academy, and the Society of Women Artists. Exhibited and sold by the prestigious Leicester Galleries, both Chang’s and Fei’s works appealed to British collectors, including William (Billy) Wilberforce Winkworth, son of the founder of the Oriental Ceramic Society, who himself joined the Department of Ceramics at the British Museum from 1922-26, before becoming a noted collector of oriental art. Chang and Fei eventually bought a home in Finchley, north London, where they created a beautiful garden. Chien-Ying Chang died in London, England in January 2004, at the age of 90. According to their wishes, Chang and Fei’s ashes were scattered on Hampstead Heath, not far from their home, in front of the magnolias of Kenwood House. Chang's work is held in UK public collections, including Museums Sheffield; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Royal West of England Academy; and the Government Art Collection. Her popular designs featuring birds and flowers are still available on greetings cards sold by The Medici Society Ltd, a London firm founded in 1908 to bring artists' work to a wider public via the most technically advanced colour reproductions, with subjects chosen for artistic value, beauty or sentiment and sold 'for the lowest price commercially possible'.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Chien-Ying Chang]
Publications related to [Chien-Ying Chang] in the Ben Uri Library