Born into a large peasant family in the Perm region, Kichigin studied at the Stroganov School of Arts and the Moscow School of Painting and Architecture, where his mentors were some of Russia’s finest painters. He was teaching at provincial art schools and beginning to earn accolades for his versatile drawings, when the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing civil war prompted him to cross the border into China.

Having settled in Harbin, Kichigin taught at the Lotos (“Lotus”) studio, where one of his students was his future wife Vera Kuznetzova. In 1928, they moved to Shanghai, and Kichigin started to show his work at joint exhibitions with the painter Victor Podgoursky, who was already well known to the local public. The China Press newspaper noted that Kichigin’s “very interesting paintings in water colors and oils” portrayed a wide range of subjects “both vividly and sympathetically.” In March 1930, after a particularly successful exhibition and sale of his work at the Royal Asiatic Society exhibition, Kichigin opened a studio at 188 Bubbling Well Road.

Every summer, Kichigin and Kuznetzova travelled extensively throughout China, visiting monasteries, towns, villages and farms; they also took trips to other countries in East and Southeast Asia. They regularly exhibited their new work at the exhibitions organised by the Shanghai Art Club, where Kichigin was a member. Some of Kichigin’s work was lost on these voyages and, in autumn 1930, thirty of his recent paintings, representing an entire summer’s work in Peking (Beijing) and Tsingtao (Qingdao), were stolen from his studio.

In 1933, Kichigin relocated his studio to a storefront in Bearn Apartments, at 10 Avenue Dubail, in the French Concession, where his next-door neighbor was his friend and colleague Victor Podgoursky. Always frugal and focused exclusively on making art, Kichigin was uninterested in material gain and personal comfort. As his wife Vera Kuznetzova observed, Kichigin was always either working or reading. The couple put up a canvas screen to make a small bedroom and devoted the rest of the space to work. With the help of the local fruit vendor, Kichigin invited models from the street and painted rickshaw pullers, coolie workers and monks. Once, he brought an aged beggar in tattered rags, had him change into a luxurious silk robe and painted him as an imperial minister.

Kichigin rarely advertised his services as a commercial artist, but he always had a surplus of clients for portraiture, art lessons and stage design. All through the 1930s and 1940s, his mastery of every drawing technique and material continued to earn him acclaim and ensured his dominant presence at art exhibitions. The illustrated book Diamond Jubilee of the International Settlement of Shanghai, produced by Ivan Kounin and Alexander Yaron in 1940, included thirteen of his artworks – mostly Chinese country landscapes and portraits.

Kichigin was actively involved in the Russian diaspora’s cultural life. He was the founder and first chairman of the artistic association Ponedelnik (Monday), which eventually gathered on Mondays in his studio, at 10 Avenue Dubail. He produced religious paintings and frescoed icons for Shanghai’s Orthodox churches. He was one of the designers of the monument to the celebrated Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, created together with Victor Podgorusky, Emmanuel Gran, Jacob Lehonos and Wladimir Livin, which was unveiled in February 1937.

When interviewed for Rubezh (Frontier) magazine in 1941, Kichigin admitted that émigré artists in Shanghai “survive, not live” and that the sense of national belonging was no less important than paints or inspiration. His artworks, executed predominantly in the realist manner, frequently turned to bucolic themes and Slav iconography, reflecting his peasant roots and his pre-revolutionary artistic influences. In Shanghai, as in Harbin, he instructed young artists, such as Thais Jaspar, Vladimir Tretchikoff, and Lydia Tsirgvava (future wife of the singer Alexander Vertinsky), among others.

In 1941, with the tightening of Japanese military control of the city, Kichigin and Kuznetzova had to give up their studio on Avenue Dubail and spent the rest of their Shanghai years in a basement room at Erin Villas, 51 Route Vallon; there, many of their works were damaged by humidity and subsequently lost. While offering art classes at the Soviet Club and working as a decorator for the Soviet Consulate, Kichigin was persistently trying to repatriate to the USSR. He turned down a lucrative offer from the Metropolitan Museum in New York and proposals to immigrate to Belgium, Britain and France. In 1947, Kichigin and Kuznetsova sailed to the USSR; their luggage consisted of multiple crates of canvases and almost no personal belongings.

The couple settled in Yaroslavl, where Kichigin faced accusations of espionage, narrowly escaping arrest. His presence in the provincial city invigorated the local artistic community and academic circles. From 1957 onwards, aided by his longtime Shanghai friend Alexander Vertinsky, Kichigin was able to exhibit his work again, although he did not return to painting the scenes from the Russian countryside and peasant life tableaux that he had missed in exile. After Kichigin’s death in 1968, his wife Vera Kuznetzova helped assemble the archive of his work at the Yaroslavl Art Museum, where his artistic legacy continues to be studied and to proliferate.