Chen DongSheng (陈冬生）(December 1946 - ) is a Chinese oil painter. He lives and works in Ganzhou, Jiangxi.
At the age of 30, Chen graduated from the Gannan Normal University in 1976, majoring in painting.
Chen was born in the village of Chen, in Huichang, close to Ganzhou city, in Jiangxi Province. Chen Dongsheng was the third of three children. At a young age his father, who was a talented vocalist, died. Without a male-figure to uphold the family in the farmlands, the family began to struggle under the weight of economic hardships. Despite the bitter suffering, Chen began to develop a keen interest in art after discovering a drawing of three shrimps etched by his late-father on the walls of his ancestral hall. He began to draw in notebooks and on paper, sometimes even drawing on his hands and legs after all his pages had been filled. This insatiable desire to sketch led him to search for abandoned tombs and ancient walls around his village, where armed with carbon pencils he would sketch scenes of domestic animals and the natural foliage around him that he saw and knew well.
After primary school, Chen was selected along with two other students to attend secondary school on full scholarship, but poor conditions at home prevented him from attending. A year passed, and again Chen was encouraged by his teachers to reapply. Upon reapplication, he was awarded full scholarship.
After finishing high school in Ningdu Normal School in 1964, Chen returned to work in the Cultural Centre in HuiChang. Chen found in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. Jiangxi had become the cradle of communist uprisings, as a wave of nationalism swept across the country. Capitalist professions and bourgeois were condemned as symbols of decadent capitalist culture, and artists were forbidden to work. From 1968-1969, Chen continued to paint life sized portraits of Mao Zedong and Lin Biao all around the province. In 1977, university entrance exams were reinstated, and a year after, Chen applied and was admitted, with full scholarship, to Gannan Normal University, where he majored in painting.
As commander of the cultural centre from 1982 onward, Chen was left little time to paint. Only after his retirement in 2000, was Chen able to dedicate his time and energy to his paintings.
Beginning from the early 2000s, Chen left the political arena to devote himself entirely to painting. In 2000, he moved to Ganzhou city, northwest of Jiangxi Province, where a lot of his paintings were conceived. Chen can best be described as a meditative landscape painter, and the subjects of his paintings are inspired by his walks he takes with his wife around the countryside.
Jiangxi’s hills, lakes and ravines are a familiar scene for many of Chinese history’s celebrated scholars and poets - Tao Yuanming (陶渊明), Southern Song scholar-general Wen Tianxiang (文天祥) and Renaissance Man Ouyang Xiu (欧阳修) all found artistic refuge in the peaceful isolation of Jiangxi’s villages. These sedentary communities, nestled in fertile valleys surrounded by mountains and fields, have continued their traditional ways of life amidst political and social revolutions, natural and man-made disasters, urbanization and industrialization. Chen Dongsheng has continued to draw artistic inspiration from the ancestral village that he was raised in, one of many that continues unfettered by the external changes taking place elsewhere throughout the country.