Biography

Born in Jinan, China in 1957, Bi Yuan Cheng began practicing art at age five under his father's encouragement. At eleven, he became a student of one of China's most prominent art professors, a mentorship in landscape, watercolour, and oil that lasted a decade. He immigrated to Canada in 1990, settling in White Rock, British Columbia, where he opened his own studio in 1992. His practice centers on oil and acrylic painting alongside large-scale mural work, and over the past decade alone, he has completed more than 50 murals throughout Alberta.

Chan trained at the Mid-Southern Academy of Fine Arts and the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in China before further study at L'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the decades since, he has held more than one hundred solo exhibitions across major cities in North America, became the first Chinese artist elected a senior member of the Federation of Canadian Artists in 1983, and received the Federation's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.