The memorial of Chen Yifei, one of China's most acclaimed painters who died three years ago, opened this weekend in the artist's hometown of Ningbo City in southeast China's Zhejiang Province.

The 750-square-meter memorial houses replicas of Chen's canvass paintings, sculptures and his fashion designs works, said Li Qixin, deputy bureau chief of the local tourism board.

"It is a pity that we don't have an authentic art piece of master Chen so far, but we will exhibit some of items used by the master in the memorial, which has been designated as a tourist spot in the city," said Li.

One of Chen's canvasses was auctioned in Hong Kong at 1.37 million HK dollars (162,000 U.S. dollars) in 1991, setting a record price for contemporary Chinese painting then. The price of Chen's painting skyrocketed after his death, with the highest record set at 1.6 million U.S. dollars at a Shanghai auction in 2006.

Chen, long suffering from stomach ulcer pains related to exhaustion and work stress, died of gastric hemorrhage on April 10,2005 at the age of 59, when he was filming a feature movie named the Barber in Zhejiang.

Chen, also dubbed as "a commercially successful painter and visual artist," created life-style brands bearing his own name and Shanghai-based high-end fashion empire in the years after he came back from the United States in 1990.

(Xinhua News Agency April 14,2008)