Born in Zhongshan County, Guangdong, China.
George Chann left for the U.S. at the age of 12 with his father, upon graduation from middle school in China. In 1934, he entered the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where in 1940, he also earned his master’s degree in fine arts. He held his first solo exhibition the following year at the California Art Club in Los Angeles. At the recommendation of Roland Mckinney, curator of the Los Angeles County Museum, George Chann held an exhibition in 1942 at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. From 1947 to 1949, he lived in Mainland China, exhibiting at the Public Archives Museum in Guangzhou and in Shanghai. In 1950, he returned to the U.S. and began to study abstract painting. In 1951 he showed with artists such as Van Gogh, Renoir, and Chagall in an exhibition at the James Vigeveno Gallery. During the years from 1969 through 1973, 50 pieces of his abstract works were exhibited at the invitation of the Pasadena Fine Arts Museum. Many of his works are currently in the permanent collections of various museums, including the Shanghai Art Museum and San Diego Museum of Art.
George Chann’s artistic career began in the early 1940s with works in primarily social-realist style. Reflecting his feelings about the inequalities and hardships around him in American society during World War II, his paintings are suffused with a critical, compassionate humanism and concern for the good of the nation. Chann returned to China in 1947, delving into calligraphy studies for a time with Chinese artists Huang Junbi and Zhao Shao-ang, while contact with the cultural environment and outstanding traditional works of painting and calligraphy encouraged development of a new Chinese modern painting style. Early in 1950, Chann successfully developed his essential black-and-white abstract approach in works with richly varied layers and textures, but which derived their inspiration from ancient artifacts and texts: the verdigris of corroded bronze, suggesting ancient civilization clouded in obscurity, or the spotty weathering of stone steles. Through the use of various media, Chann achieved raised surfaces with genuine textural feel and a unique abstract style in which the strength of traditional calligraphy and textural sources are voiced in a modern Chinese mode. George Chann’s late-period works, emphasizing variant Chinese character forms, are impressive for their exquisite, shifting colors and complex but rhythmic compositions. Their calligraphy, texts, and symbols have now undergone further abstraction and configuration, weaving through white lines and multicolored composition like rhythmic notes of a melody.