"Arriving in Shanghai, I had exactly 100 yuan and a portfolio of paintings."

CP Gill also known by his Chinese name “Li Yunfei” arrived in Beijing in 1992 to study Mandarin and lived and worked in China for over twenty years. Later that year he opened his first studio in the artists’ village of the Old Summer Palace, the centre of all the emerging Chinese artists at that time.

Chris moved to Shanghai in 1997, a fast-growing city and over time Gill created a visual diary of the changing society in China, documenting and interpreting the reform process in his own style, his journalism and his painting fed one another directly.  He actively took part in creating the local Shanghai art scene with being one of the rare foreign artists occupying studios at the 696 Weihai road and the M50 art communities. In 2007 he became the first living foreign artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Art titled CITY of GOLD!

Gill returned to the UK in 2014 as his eyesight deteriorated further. The largest oils were too big to bring - they're stored in a warehouse in Shanghai.

He'd spent two decades recording a country that never stopped changing. Now the change had to be his own - a new way of seeing, a new way of working, if he was going to carry on. And he did: back in the UK, his sight already failing, he began the Bitcoin series, that same questioning eye swung from a country in flux to money itself, dissolving into code.

For most of his life, a CP Gill meant an original - a canvas in his workspace, on a museum wall, a gallery opening or a collector’s treasure. This is now changing.

For the first time, selected works are available as fine art high-quality Giclée prints: the same monumental subjects, the same restless eye, but now in a new and accessible format. Each print is meticulously produced to ensure the closest representation to the original artwork.

CP Gill’s work has a strong sense of linking myth and reality. Across mixed media, oil, drawings, collage, and found materials functions as a personal visual diary of that era, capturing the collision of cultures, ideologies, and identities unfolding around him daily.

Then, in 2010, the diagnosis: multiple sclerosis. Of everything it could have taken, it came for his sight.

"I am a painter who always had one luxury of perfect eyes my whole life, so this sudden attack on my life was a sharp and nasty drop into another place where I was lost, alone and blind. There is no real answer to what you do in this situation except panic. So, I panicked."

"First imagined in 2014 when electronic currencies were just beginning to challenge traditional cash, it envisions a future when hard cash fades into memory. I collected coins from around the world and transformed them into paintings as a kind of prophesy. These coins have served us well, passing through countless hands. I hope the currencies of the future will do the same."