Yeh Ch'ien-yü (1907-), cartoonist and painter. He won fame as the creator of the comic strip "Mr. Wang and Litde Ch'en." He later became head of the Chinese painting department at the Peking Academy of Fine Arts. Little is known of Yeh Ch'ien-yü's early years. He was a native of Chekiang province and was educated at Amoy University. Largely self-taught, he began his professional career in 1929 by drawing cartoons for the Shanghai Sketch, a weekly paper. He leapt to fame with a comic strip entitled "Mr. Wang and Little Ch'en," which appeared regularly in the Shanghai Morning Post and the Nanking Post. Mr. Wang was the typical middle-class Chinese, proud possessor of all the philistine vices; Little Ch'en was his foil. Yeh's cartoons, done with a pen, showed great technical skill and were reminiscent of the style of the English cartoonist Gilbert Wilkinson. During this period, Yeh also edited Modern Miscellany, a fortnightly pictorial.

The Sino-Japanese war, which erupted in the summer of 1937, gave Chinese cartoonists a new importance and a free hand with their satire, provided that it was directed at officially approved targets. In August 1937 Yeh Ch'ienyü, in cooperation with other artists, organized China's first cartoonist propaganda corps. After the fall of Shanghai and Nanking, the group moved to Hankow, where it became a section of the political department of the Military Affairs Commission. At Hankow, the cartoonist section produced a series of propaganda posters calling for national mobilization and resistance against the Japanese. From Hankow, Yeh Ch'ien-yü moved westward again to Chungking, where he edited the pictorial magazine China Today, a governmentsponsored monthly. During the war years, Yeh traveled widely as an official artist. In 1942 and 1943 he visited India, Tibet, and the Miao tribal country in Kweichow province to record his impressions of people and places. In 1944 United States government officials in China invited him to draw cartoons for the Office of War Information. Exhibitions of his work were held at Chungking, Kweiyang, Calcutta, and Bombay. During the war years, Yeh's interests turned away from pure cartooning to sketching with a Chinese brush and the development of a painting style using traditional methods. A portrait of his wife, the dancer Tai Ai-lien (q.v.), typifies his work of the late war years. Its delicate rendering shows the strong influence on Yeh of Buddhist cave paintings.

In 1946 Yeh Ch'ien-yü was invited to the United States on a year-long visit under a cultural exchange program administered by the Department of State. He was at the time a mernber of the Shanghai Artists Association and had just received an invitation from Hsü Pei-hung (q.v.) to become head of the Chinese painting department at the Peking Academy of Fine Arts. Deferring assumption of that post, Yeh accepted the invitation to the United States. Accompanied by his wife, he arrived at Washington on 7 September 1946. He was entertained at a luncheon at Blair House on 18 September. During the ensuing months, Yeh visited museums and art centers throughout the United States. He had brought a collection of Chinese cartoons by himself and other artists. This collection was exhibited in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle at the time of his visits to those cities. In February 1947 he was entertained at an official reception given by the Artists' League of America in New York, and he also attended the annual meeting of the American Federation of Arts. His wife, Tai Ai-lien, gave dance recitals in New York during the winter.

Yeh Ch'ien-yü arrived back in China with his wife in August 1947. He then proceeded to north China to take up his post at the Peking Academy of Fine Arts. In the summer of 1949 he was a delegate to the initial meeting of the All-China Federation of Literary and Arts Circles, the principal organization used to channel Chinese Communist party directives into the fields of literature and the fine arts. After the People's Republic of China was established, in 1951 he became a vice chairman of the Union of Chinese Artists, the national organization under the literary-arts federation responsible for coordinating activities in the field of painting. In 1960 he was elected to membership on the third national committee of the All-China Federation of Literary and Arts Circles.

Although a few new cartoons by Yeh Ch'ienyü appeared in China during the Korean conflict in the early 1950's, he generally eschewed cartooning in favor of illustrations based on life sketches, some of which appeared in publications of the Foreign Languages Press at Peking. Various collections of Yeh's work were published in the early 1960's. These included: Ch'ien-yu su-hsieh 1958-1959 [sketches by Yeh Ch'ien-yü, 1958-1959], Yeh Ch'ien-yu tso-p'in hsiao-chi [a small collection of Yeh Ch'ien-yü's works], and Tsai Nei-meng yü Kuang-hsi [in Inner Mongolia and Kwangsi], all of 1963; and Jen-wu hua-chi [pictures of people and things], of 1964.