The Artwork of Brother Hu Chen

Brother Hu Chen is a member of Divine Word Missionaries (SVD) who was born in the Northwest of China in 1982. He has been passionate about Chinese traditional painting art since his early childhood. He joined SVD in 2007 and began to study Chinese traditional painting systematically.  During his study, he discovered that contemporary Chinese Christian art is still dominated by Western oil paintings, and Chinese traditional paintings are rarely used to express Christian faith. He gradually became interested in the localization of Christian art.

In order to devote more time and focus on the work of this area, he decided to become an SVD Brother to serve the Church especially in the aspect of Church art after graduation in 2014. He established the Department of Religious Art at Jilin Seminary in China in 2017 and initiated the art education for the seminarians in the Church of China. He has been committed to the promotion, teaching and creation of the contextualization of Christian art over these years and achieved good results. He has accomplished series of religious-themed ink wash paintings with the background of the Bible. The exhibitions of his hard works were successively held in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xi'an, Taiwan, Italy, Ireland and more.