Critics on Dr. T.F. Chen’s Art
Since 1980, Dr. T.F. Chen and his art have been written up and continuously featured in countless media throughout the world. For example, he has been covered in major art magazines such as: ArtNews, Art In America, Art Forum, Flash Art, Fine Art, Dynasty Art News, Artists’ Magazine; dozens of major Asian Art magazines such as Asia ArtNews, Lion Monthly Art Magazine; as well as major TV stations, newspapers and radio shows (such as BBC, Reuters, The Daily News), etc. Here are some noted other comments on him:
“On behalf of the Friends of the United Nations, we are most impressed by your (Dr. T.F. Chen’s) art of multiculturalism, your lifetime of work dedicated to peace, tolerance and love and for creating a body of work expressing a shared vision of humanity. Moreover, as a recipient of the 2001 Global Tolerance Award, we hereby designate you a ‘Cultural Ambassador of Tolerance and Peace’ and rely on your continued support in promoting the United Nations program of action to this affect.“
— Dr. Noel Brown, President, Friends of the United Nations
Global Tolerance Award Letter to Dr. T.F. Chen, 2001
“Tsing-fang Chen’s work bears on issues of global importance today. He is an artist whom history has invited into a more complex and composite role than the traditional Modernist role of the master esthetician. Like certain others of this moment he sees the world of the artist in a broader sense than that, overlapping with the activities of the philosopher, the social scientist, the historian, and the cultural theorist. The present moment in history needs the mediation of cultural pastiche to facilitate the emergence of a global art awareness that may prepare the way for a global sense of human identity. This type of mediation happens frequently in Chen’s paintings.”
— Dr. Thomas McEvilley, Renowned Professor & Art Critic The Post-Modern Art of T.F. Chen: “Images of a Global Humanity,” 1990
Chen’s art seems genuinely to comprehend the issues the term post-Modern signals…….
Chen’s practice, of course, has resonances beyond or in addition to those of a Western appropriator. Chinese tradition has gone through something like the developmental cycles involved in European history at least a couple of times. With such a surfeit of history, Chen is more involved with the possibilities of the future than with such passionately dark obsessions as the death of the past. Chen’s special preoccupation with Van Gogh along with Jackson Pollock, the quintessentially self-expressive examples of individualism in Modern art in the West suggests an attempt to rearrange not just his work but his life. In both his life travels and in his art he had made himself a cross-or multicultural individual, to suggest the citizenry of an age to come or at least one idea of what such a selfhood might be.
— Dr. Thomas McEvilley, Renowned Professor & Art Critic–
(Review T. F. Chen Lucia Gallery Art Forum,1991,10)-
“Admittedly the Neo-Iconography of Tsing-fang Chen is not without its enigma. It is complex, demanding, and ultimately rewarding in a thousand subtle ways. It is a high tower built with bricks, each of which is recognizable as a brick with a certifiable genealogy. But hold on – the bricks are not homogenous. They are a multiplicity of icons from different ages, different cultures, and different original intents. To grasp the tower, even partially, brings savory visual rewards. Both the emotional heart and the meditative mind are touched. Chen’s iconography unfolds. Images of West and East juxtapose and interact in a profound philosophical synthesis which is simultaneously beautiful and painfully disturbing. There is a visual language here, in a bursting of creation, which is not only richly sensuous but has something to say that humanity dares not ignore.”
— Lawrence Jeppson, Art Critic & Art Appraiser
One Hundred Examples of the Neo-Iconography of Tsing-fang Chen, 1990
“Chen’s paintings make a very good case for his theories with their brilliant reworking of earlier masterpieces, each skillfully painted in the style of the particular artist he is emulating, yet simultaneously transformed by coloristic variations and other subtle touches that belong to him alone… Unlike other artists who ‘appropriate’, Dr. T. F. Chen, a scholar, a philosopher, and a veritable ‘school’ unto himself, creates powerful, highly original paintings that stand on their own, as major works in their own right.”
— Ed McCormack, Art Critic
“Dr. T.F. Chen, a ‘school’ unto himself,” Artspeak, April 16, 1989
Chen’s paintings are so full of fantasy and humor and display such technical mastery that we are extremely pleased to have made their acquaintance…T.F. Chen’s “Post Van Gogh Series” is like the creation of a reborn Van Gogh!”
— Dr. Jan Hulsker, a leading world authority on van Gogh, and former Director
of Van Gogh Museum & Director-General of Cultural Affairs for the Netherlands
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TF Chen art tour in Taiwan