PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

CHEN Yifei likes to paint bridges. And steps. In his Suzhou series of oils, the Chinese town becomes a succession of beautiful, shadowy spans between water and sky. His Tibetan work has gradations of temple roofs leading up to the mountains. Even his portraits, so often like soft-focus photographs, are a form of link, connecting the artistic with the realistic. His critics are inclined to get a bit sniffy about that - much too flattering, they say - but Chen has never been the sort of artist who specialises in warts-and-all treatments. He is the man, after all, for whom the term 'romantic realist' was coined.

So here he is, standing in the realistic but romantic lobby of Shanghai's Peace Hotel amid a muddle of local businessmen and American tourists, managing to look like neither. He is too well-dressed for one thing, plus a driver has his Cadillac ticking over in the autumn sunshine outside. Since he lives in New York for most of the year, he now finds himself straddling two cultures, forever playing bridge. This has been the story of his life. For one of his most famous paintings, Thinking Of History From My Space, he divided his huge canvas in two. The left-hand side depicts scenes of war and poverty in early 20th-century China; the right is intended to show hope and success. The visual connection is the artist himself who can be seen standing back, gazing at both sections. As personal metaphors go, this one, created back in 1980, was pretty prescient.

Chen, 49, used to live near the Peace Hotel, right by The Bund, when he was a child. Now he has a home in the smart quarter of Shanghai; you have to pass Harvey Nichols, Prada and Ferragamo outlets to get there. When he thinks about his history today, his space consists of air and light, an enormous television screen and squishy leather sofas. Six canvases stacked in a little studio downstairs are being finished for next weekend's Art Asia fair in Hong Kong. In 1992, Sir Run Run Shaw paid almost $2 million for a work entitled Soiree, so the net worth of these unfinished pieces must be considerable. Doesn't he worry about security? 'No, I haven't signed them yet,' he laughs. 'When I sign, then I worry.' There is a benign air of calm hanging about him which is entirely misleading. The benign bit isn't - he is a generous man, affable to strangers in the street, happy to share the good life - but the serenity crusts an ambition which propels him with considerable force. At the moment, as well as bridging two countries, he is determined to combine two careers, as painter and as film director. He has just finished his first feature film, Evening Liasion, starring Tony Leung Kar-fai and a Beijing model called Mabel Zhang, which was shown at Cannes in May and will come to Hong Kong early in 1996. Obsession is perhaps too strong a word but he is certainly deeply concerned about this cinematic foray. Over a two-day interview which coincided with the Shanghai Film Festival, it was the film world he talked about, constantly speculating on future projects; the paintings seemed, already, to be connected to the past.

HE was starving long before he became an artist in a garret. His history is typical of his generation in China; hunger, fear and deprivation figure largely. 'It's a little bit sad,' he offers of his childhood, pinching his fingers together unhappily. His father was a chemical engineer who worked in a factory and rarely saw his three children. 'He worked very hard; some people say that I work too hard so maybe I am like him in that. But the romantic side I get from my mother.' She had been brought up by Catholic missionaries, was briefly a nun and never lost an affinity for the culture of the West. 'Every Sunday, my mother took us kids to one of the French churches and we used to run around looking at the sculptures, the coloured glass. It wasn't too easy to see films then, but we could go and see movies at my father's factory. One day, on my way home from school, I heard them play the music of a new film and I ran so quickly to tell my mother that I fell, my knees were bleeding ... ' At school, he joined an art group and spent his time sketching. He could not afford water-colours, neither could he pay for private tuition. Instead, he would stand outside the studios where the richer students paid for instruction. 'I wanted to look at the place. Just to look,' he remembers.

Against his father's wishes, he chose to apply to the High School of Art and was one of 100 accepted out of 3,000 applicants. Later, when he went to Shanghai Art College, he was one of only three oil painters admitted to the last class before the college closed.

At first, he felt hampered by mediocrity. 'When I started to study, I saw that my paintings were only in the middle. I wanted to be number one. So when my classmates were asleep, I worked very hard. I became a good student.' There was little to eat, nothing to distract his purpose. He says he had hopes, even then, of working in film and that he went to the High School of Art because he thought it would lead to Shanghai Film College - 'so it's been a dream for 30 years'.