Arifien Neif was born in Surabaya, East Java, in 1955. His artistic skills probably were inherited from his grandmother, who liked to make handicrafts. So great was Arifien’s desire to become an artist that at an early age he learned to paint on his own. In 1970 he moved to Jakarta and worked as a mason and at the same time continued to pursue his interest in art. His experience as an interior designer made him sensitive to this aspect in his paintings. 

He uses tertiary colors that are directly mixed and layered on the canvas. In his works, the artist focuses on ordinary people and shows them in an expressive style with spontaneous brush strokes. By using themes from daily life, he composes and improvises to create images of fantasy and romance. The figures have dynamic shapes with strong lines and are modified, distorted or deformed in order to portray their emotions. Arifien interprets human figures into more artistic forms and explores them in his imagination, dreams and thoughts. He plays with relationships between the main figures and their surroundings, placing them in narrative scenes that can be open to different interpretations. 

Arifien Neif has participated in several group exhibitions in Indonesia, Singapore, China, Italy, and Monaco. He has also held solo shows in Jakarta, Bandung, Singapore, and California.

His journey, a life stage that shaped his artwork from the very beginning have been published in the books Arifien: The Life and Fantasy of an Emerging Indonesian Painter (1997), Arifien (2008) and Wonderful World, Theater of Life – Arifien Neif (2013).