Collector
Dr. Chen’s “Art Collectors series” is arrived quite naturally in his combination of Neo-Iconographic paintings which organize different images from masterpieces of Western art history. Since Dr. Chen got the Ph. D. from the Sorbonne in modern art history, he is so familial with images inside the paintings of Impressionists and going on, especially of the Post-Impressionists. Actually this series came from Chen’s using Van Gogh’s portraits on Pere Tanguy, a warm friendly seller of artists’ supplies at Montmartre in 1880s. He is kind towards the struggling or unrecognized avant-garde artists that he allowed them to exchange their artworks with art supplies and displayed their artworks in his store, including paintings by Pissarro, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh etc. Therefore Pere Tanguy indirectly became the first collector of new art which became the main stream in art history. Vincent van Gogh arrived Paris in 1886 and became friend of Pere Tanguy and painted two portraits of him, both in frontal figure with Japanese Yukiyo-e as background. Such setting inspired Dr. Chen to enrich the setting with Cezanne’s till life in front of the figure and on the wall of the background with some masterpieces of the Western art while the central figure can be changed to any portrait with frontal figure like primitives of photography. Such a way of making a portrait into Chen’s Neo-I. style, such as his portrait of the President of the ROC on Taiwan by integrating Picasso’s cubistic still life and Rouault’s landscape which transformed a “living portrait” into a post-modern painting.
