MOVIE-MAKING and painting are pretty much the same where artist Chen Yifei is concerned. Chen, who has forged a highly lucrative career as a painter of Chinese scenes, recently applied his creative skills to the cinema, and the result is Evening Liaison.
An atmospheric mystery set in the Shanghai of the 1930s, it features Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Kar-fai and Beijing-based model Mabel Zhang, and is due for release in Hong Kong shortly.
Chen says of his venture into movies: 'Film and painting are very similar. The camera is my brush and the screen is the canvas. I treat the film like a moving painting.' He seems to have made a smooth transition from art to cinema: Evening Liaison impressed enough selectors to gain a showing at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.
A graduate of the Shanghai Fine Art Academy, Chen has had considerable success in the West, and once set a record for fetching the highest price for a Chinese oil painting. Movie mogul Sir Run Run Shaw, for example, picked up his Soiree for close to $2 million.
Critics may dismiss Chen's ultra-realist style as bland and derivative, but his paintings have been exhibited in New York and Tokyo, and been auctioned for high prices at both Christie's and Sotheby's.
The somewhat whimsical imagery of his paintings carried over into his first film, a short called Reveries Of Old Shanghai. The film is a picturesque, plot-less homage to the colourful Shanghai of the 30s and played alongside his paintings at exhibitions.