Chan Yu was born in Chongqing, China in 1982, but unlike other Chinese artists, he had a different childhood growing up in Hong Kong. Chan Yu chose to return to China to study art at the renowned Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and after obtaining a Bachelor and Master degree in Fine Art, he made Chongqing his permanent home, which he found more inspiring for his artistic career.  After a few years of developing and exploring his painting technique, Chan Yu has established his personal style of composing multiple overlapping images, for the unique reason of projecting different perspectives of a same figure on a single canvas.
 
One of his most popular and recent series uses well-known personalities as his subject matter.  These personalities are chosen for their iconic significance, being cultural icons and influential legends in their respective fields of fashion, art and music.  Although they passed on at an early age, at the height of their careers, their influence is everlasting, and it is the essence of this quality that Chan Yu captures in his work. By creating a vivid scene with distinctive colours that cross each other, Chan Yu not only opens up to a new space of visual reading but also explores and evokes new meanings from diverse points of view.  When we look at James Dean, an iconic figure comes to mind immediately, but he is only very remotely understood. Who is James Dean actually?  What we know are mostly learned from the movies, news or internet.  But there are different sides to each person, and different angles of perspectives, as implied from Chan Yu’s paintings.