Collection: Alexander Chen Artist Biography and Art Gallery Collection

Born in Canton, China in 1952, Alexander Chen is an internationally renowned artist with extraordinary vision and talent. Chen began drawing when he was a child and even during four years between the ages of sixteen and twenty when he worked as a farmer in the Chinese countryside, he kept drawing and painting the world around him. Soon, though, he turned to road theater, where he painted scenery and stage backgrounds. Six years later, at the age twenty-six, Alexander Chen found himself back in Canton, where he began his formal art education at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. When Chen paints, he uses a hyper realist style, documenting every person, window, stoplight, and advertisement he sees in front of him. As preparation for his work, Chen will take hundreds of photos. He recalls that, in his studio, he has more than ten hard drives to back up his photography. Inspired by the artists of the Song Dynasty and the way they could capture 1,000 people in each painting, Alexander Chen can take up to three months to unearth so much detail in each of his works. In fact, his paintings are so detailed that he's only completed 400 paintings in 20 years, a very small number in comparison to many of his contemporaries.

Inspired by his various travels and his eventually immigration to the United States in 1989, Alexander Chen's paintings and pen and ink drawings often feature national parks, cityscapes, countryside views, and the pulsing energy of New York City, Tokyo, and Las Vegas. Brilliantly colored and delicately detailed, the vivid images he creates have been collected and lauded around the world. His work has been features in calendars, turned into jigsaw puzzles, and published in books and advertisements. Alexander Chen is an official Artist for the U.S. Olympic Team, as well. He created originals for both the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics and the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. He has the distinguished honor of being the only Olympic Artist sanctioned by both the U.S. Olympic Committee and the Beijing Olympic Committee. Chen was also recently commissioned to create a painting celebrating the United States Olympic team's participation in the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Chen's paintings and limited edition fine art prints can be found in private collections as well as being collected or licensed by companies including Toshiba Electric, Northwest Airlines, UNICEF and various art trade magazines around the world.