Live Event Sketching · Caricature Artist · Germany & Switzerland
Academy-trained painter, guest professor, restaurateur, and one of Germany’s most experienced live event artists – Wen’s story is as remarkable as his six-minute portraits.
Born in China at the end of the Cultural Revolution, Wen discovered drawing as a boy – earning pocket money sketching travellers waiting for trains outside the local railway station. At seventeen, a school trip to Beijing brought him face to face with a Robert Rauschenberg exhibition; Warhol fascinated him, Joseph Beuys left a lasting mark.
At barely twenty, with 250 dollars in his pocket, he spent 100 of them on a ticket for the Trans-Siberian Railway and travelled through Mongolia, Siberia and Russia to Moscow – then on to Berlin and Düsseldorf. Having secured a window seat, he sketched the landscapes flying past and sold the drawings to well-heeled fellow passengers.
In Cologne, while preparing his portfolio and working in a restaurant kitchen, he came across a street artist on the cathedral square advertising portraits in 20 minutes. Wen set up next to him with a sign of his own: six minutes. The time saving won him a summer full of customers – and the speed became his signature.
In 1993 he was accepted at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, one of Europe’s most renowned art academies, where he studied painting until 1999 and earned the title of Meisterschüler (master student). Throughout his studies he kept refining his live portraiture in the streets of Paris, London, Berlin and New York.
A footnote for the curious: after his studies Wen also founded three of Düsseldorf’s best-loved restaurants – proof that he knows a thing or two about hospitality, which you will notice in how warmly he treats your guests.