Oil painter Chen Yifei's painting Warm Spring in the Jade Pavilion was sold for 149.5 million yuan ($22.7million) at China Guardian's autumn auction on Tuesday night, a record price for Chen's works and for Chinese realistic oil paintings.
The oil painting, one of Chen's most important works, was done in 1993, and was sold the same year in Hong Kong for about HK$2 million, a record for Chinese oil paintings then.
Chen was one of the most influential contemporary artists in China and known for his paintings on melancholic and lonely women in traditional outfits.
Chen went to the United States to study art in the 1980s, and settled in Shanghai after returning to China in 1990.
Warm Spring in the Jade Pavilion depicts life in Shanghai in the 1930s.
The painting was bought by Chinese collector Liu Yiqian, who's known for his purchase of Amedeo Modigliani's 1917 portrait of a nude woman for $170.4 million at Christie's in New York in 2014, the world's second most expensive artwork.
