He started learning oil painting in secondary school, and acquainted himself with young artists like Chen Yifei and Xia Baoyuan.
With the restoration of the National Higher Education Entrance Examination in 1978 after the ending of the Cultural Revolution, Chen Danqing was admitted to the oil paintings department of China Central Academy of Fine Arts as a graduate student.
In the early 1980s, Chen painted in the Socialist Realist style and was at one stage described by the government as the most talented oil painter in China[citation needed].
Chen was represented exclusively by Wally Findlay Galleries in New York, Palm Beach, Beverly Hills and Paris.
[1] This new work departed from the size of his earlier Socialist Realist painting in favor of the intimate style and scale of the nineteenth-century French naturalists.
Chen participated in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony with planning, design, and creating prose written in the book of zhang.
Chen Danqing returned to China in 2000 and took his students to go to the Beijing Road Village painting farmers, veterans, to underground mine workers.
2010, Yang Feiyun and Chen Danqing planned two major art exhibitions – "Back to the Sketch," and "In the Face of the Original Code".