Writers › Writer / Poet
Chen Renjian
Puxian opera playwright from Xianyou, Fujian, who in 1956 turned the old play Shi Tianwen into the tragedy After the Reunion and later wrote Chuncao Storms the Court.
In a study at night, a desk holds a brush pot, a porcelain vase with a plum branch, a lit red lantern, a folded fan and an unrolled blank scroll, with no one seated there, while through a round window the moon rises over a lake with a sailboat.
Chen Renjian was born in Xianyou, Fujian, in 1913. As a young man he studied Chinese painting, learning landscape in Putian and spending about a year at an art school in Shanghai, before turning to writing for Puxian opera; he was one of the founders of the Lisheng Troupe of Xianyou County. In 1956 he reworked the Qing-era traditional play Shi Tianwen into After the Reunion, which was staged in Beijing in 1959 and later filmed as an opera film by Changchun Film Studio. In 1979 he wrote the satirical comedy Chuncao Storms the Court, which many other opera forms have adapted. He left sixty-eight plays and more than thirty essays on drama, and died in 1995.
Life and times
Dates 1913–1995