Pianist, composer, painter, president of the association Tao Antique, TCHEN Gi-Vane, deeply artistic, has led an extraordinary career. After a fascinating existence with her parents, famous pioneers in journalism and founders of great dailies in Beijing and Nanjing (1923-1924), TCHENGi-Vane was brutally forced to learn the path of
exile. When the sino-japanese war burst out in 1937. Her family, who had lost everything, fled to Hong-Kong for the first time. Having returned to Shangai some time later with her mother, TCHEN Gi-Vane studied in the Conservatory of Music. Her professors were White Russian refugees from the famous Imperial Conservatory of Russia, and her music professor with whom she would study atonal music, was one of the german refugees of Jewish origin from the school of Schoenberg. In 1949, her family fled a second time to Hong-Kong, where TCHEN Gi-Vane continued her works of composition.

One day in Hong-kong, having the opportunity to meet the French pianist Germaine Mounier, she presented her musical scores to her and confided in her her desire to continue her studies in Paris. Back in France, Germaine Mounier showed these scores to Darius Milhaud who succeeded in obtaining a visa for TCHEN Gi-Vane. On the 11 November 1951, TCHEN Gi-Vane disembarked in Paris with two suitcases.
She then followed Jean Rivier composition courses, who replaced Darius Milhaud when he went to the United Stades. In winter 1952, TCHENGi-Vane, assisting at a concert of her works played by the violonist Roland Charmy, professor at the Conservatory of Paris and husband of Lily Laskine, met an ex-officer of the French National Navy in the Far East,with whom she married the following year.

Henceforth, her destiny linked to France through marriage, events of communist China were to separate TCHENGi-Vane from her native country. She would not see her father, who was installed in Taiwan where he had developed a school of journalism of international reputation, again until 1969; as for her mother, deceased in Beijing in 1975, TCHENGi-Vane wasnever to see her again, as she returned to China only in 1983.

In France, TCHEN Gi-Vane performed several concerts, created ballets, taught taoist dance at the Pleyel Hall in Paris. Attracted by other artistic disciplines, she left music and turned to painting. In 1973, she created the Association of "Antique Tao" in Rambouillet, and today she possesses a deep mastery in the Tao, which is neither a philosophy, nor a religion, nor a science, but rather an art of life based on Yin-Yang. In 1981, TCHEN Gi-Vane tried to be a candidate to the presidency of the French Republic; a woman of character, she continues today to surprise us by her multi-facetted personality.

Text : Dominique Camus : "Le guide des maisons d'artistes et d'écrivains en région parisienne"
Photography : Laurent Son, october 1998, at the Pagode-Auditorium Wan Yun Lou