The good earth: Jun Chen’s painterly landscape odyssey is a wondrous labour of love
Chinese-born artist Jun Chen fell in love with the Australian landscape when he migrated here in 1990 and since then he has been on an odyssey to record that love.
Over the past few decades artist Jun Chen has been falling in love with the Australian landscape. Of course, landscape painting is an important tradition in his homeland of China.
Trained in traditional Chinese brush painting at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Chen migrated to Australia in 1990 and completed his masters in fine art at the Queensland University of Technology. Since the late 1990s he has exhibited regularly in Australia and Asia and is now part of the stable at Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane, where his current exhibition is showing.
A regular finalist in the Wynne and Archibald prizes, in 2021 he was a finalist in both – with a landscape painted in central Queensland, Dried Bush, and his portrait of fellow Brisbane artist Joe Furlonger.
Recognisable by their thickly applied paint and expressive, gestural quality, his oil paintings are held in public institutions including the collection of Parliament House, Canberra, the Art Gallery of NSW, Guangzhou Art Gallery in China, and in private collections throughout Australia and abroad.
And as well as his landscapes, Chen is a master portrait artist. His wonderful portrait of former Queensland Ballet artistic director Li Cunxin is part of the collection at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.
As a disclaimer I should mention that I have known Chen for some years and that he has, for his sins, painted my portrait twice for the Brisbane Portrait Prize. On both occasions he was a finalist and, well, I felt like a finalist, too.
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His portraits are amazing and he has been a regular finalist in the Archibald Prize. His portrait of his former art dealer, Ray Hughes, was highly commended in 2017. Everyone thought it was the preferred winner, actually, but that’s a typical Archibald story right there.
After Ray Hughes closed his gallery, Chen approached Philip Bacon, cold calling him one day. He must have done a pretty good pitch because Bacon, known for his artistic acumen, took him on.
They started out modestly with Chen dropping off a couple of paintings at the gallery before departing for a trip to China. A week or so later gallery manager Lachlan Henderson rang him to tell him both had sold in a matter of days.
“I was very happy,” says Chen, and so was Philip Bacon, who says the artist has become “one of Australia’s favourite artists, and has been since his arrival from China in 1990”.
“It’s not hard to understand why, as his use of colour, and the way he manipulates the heavy impasto on the canvas is unique,” Bacon says. “His talent lies in both the choice of subject matter – such as the Jacarandas in New Farm Park, or the glorious blossoms of flowering magnolias in Toowoomba – and the mesmerising final effect he achieves. An exhibition of Jun Chen is always highly anticipated and hugely successful.”
There are some of the flowering magnolia works Bacon refers to in the current show. They are beyond beautiful. But there are also newer works from his travels to the Queensland Outback with fellow artist and friend Joe Furlonger (I was about to jokingly describe them as the greatest duo since Burke and Wills, but thought better of that.)
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Chen and Furlonger drove out to Winton together last year, camping along the way and traversing the wide, open spaces of Outback Queensland, as they have done a few times before.
Chen’s artworks from the pair’s 2024 expedition (unlike Burke and Wills, they came back) are rustic and compelling. Near Winton, painted this year, shows gum trees and the red earth against a cloud-mottled sky. Most Australian painters have a crack at the landscape at some stage and Chen is well placed to join a Pantheon that includes the likes of Drysdale, Boyd and Nolan, among others.
Bush and Mountain, another work from the 2024 trip, is a perfect composition with ochre red earth, trees and a mysterious mountain hunched in the background. It is the epitome of Australian landscape painting, seen through the eyes of a painter who grew up in a very different landscape altogether.
And that’s perhaps part of Chen’s secret. He is in his 60s now and still on a journey of discovery. He looks at the landscape in wonder and records that wonder, sometimes en plein air and also back at his studio in Underwood where he works diligently from 7.30am to 5pm six days a week. His dedication has paid off.
He lives not far from his studio with wife Grace and children Hailey and Hunter and is not part of any artistic salons (not that I know of). He’s mainly interested in family and work – his job entails producing the most exquisite paintings of the Australia he has come to know.
If you haven’t seen Chen’s work before, I suggest you pop into Philip Bacon Galleries and prepare to be bowled over.
The majesty of his art will inspire you and a beautiful painting like the recently completed Wild flowers (a landscape carpeted in colourful blooms) will simply take your breath away.
Jun Chen exhibition continues at Philip Bacon Galleries, Fortitude Valley, until July 19.