The historical starting point of Chinese new painting is the "scar art" in the early 80s of the 20th century. Under the mutual support of the "questioning" and "exposing" emotions of "scar art" and the modernist slogan similar to the "Star Art Exhibition", new ideas and artistic expressions that did not coincide with the art of "glorifying" the system and the corresponding ideological stance began to appear, and the ideas and styles of new art soon gained some legitimacy. Based on the context of the time, the artist's (Wu Guanzhong)'s advocacy of "formal beauty" and "abstract beauty" is essentially a call for the removal of the oppression of cultural autocracy and the struggle for the freedom of artistic creation, rather than the progressive relationship of artistic language like European modernism—clues such as Courbet, Manet, Monet, Seurat, Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso, Kandinsky, and Dalí. During this period, "emancipation of the mind" was a legitimate political expression, and as a result, the influence of Western philosophy, politics, literature, art, religion and other humanities in China constituted an important factor in changing the old ideological logic, and artists born in the fifties and sixties of the 20th century no longer followed and used the literary and artistic ideas and methods used by their predecessors before 1976, although they started with realistic painting.
Chi Ming, Noah, oil on canvas, 70cm×90cm, 2020
With the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (December 1978) as the center, China's development began to involve the commercial market model, and the market ideology gradually gained a certain degree of legitimacy.
In the period when reform and opening up was dominated by economic construction, strict artistic standards lost their uniqueness, and as a result, the evaluation scale of artistic language and methods began to be blurred. The 1989 exhibition of modern Chinese art at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing was seen more as a short-lived triumph of modernism, despite its uncontrolled drama.
Lin Wen, The Aromatic Death of the Cold Bed, oil on canvas, 155cm×200cm×3, 2017
Around 1989, many artists and critics (Gu Wenda, Huang Yongping, Xu Bing, Wu Shanzhuan, Fei Dawei, Gao Minglu, Zhou Yan, Kong Chang'an, Hou Hanru, etc.) left China one after another—many of them believed that the development of new art had become a problem when modernism was blocked in China, so they were unanimous in their efforts to seek future possibilities in Western countries. However, in any case, after the conceptual changes of the "85 New Wave", the artists who completely broke away from the previous official ideology and started contemporary painting in the 90s of the 20th century showed new historical characteristics, and the social and political context in which they lived seemed to meet the conditions of these artists in China. The important event was Deng Xiaoping's "Southern Speech" in the spring of 1992, the core of which was that reform must continue. The state leaders demanded that people continue to implement the policy of economic development set by the Third Plenary Session of the 11 th CPC Central Committee. At a time when ideology is weakening and artists need to continue to use their imaginations, most people prefer to think that the freedom of art still exists, because the legitimacy of the market has opened up the free space of art, and the market economy has begun to have a new impact on art. It is in this context that the paintings of "cynical realism" and "political pop" and their influence on the development of contemporary art were born—Chinese symbols became an important feature of contemporary art.
Qiao Xiangwei, Where I Live, Rain and Dew Linen on Canvas, 200cm×200cm, 2023
The market economy supported artists to create more freely from the material and life levels, and then the concept and method of painting changed further, and I started to use the term "new painting" in 2007. If we have to find the common denominators of political pop and their intersections, it is that there is no essentialist questioning, but there is the revelation of real problems, it is not the standard of Westernism, but there is a universal attitude of globalization, it no longer attacks specific goals, but there are juxtaposed conflicts, what art is not discussed, but it adheres to the position of art history, and there is no unique interpretation, but there is a distinct concept. ”
From the late 90s of the 20th century to the years after 2000, critics began to use key words such as "cynicism", "Chinese brand", "international integration", "postcolonial" and the so-called "postmodern" for early Chinese new painting. It has also been questioned by some critics in China because of its popularity in the international and domestic markets, but it is certain that "new painting" is not part of China's national cultural strategy, and there is nothing to suggest that those new Chinese paintings, which have been in the international spotlight since the early 90s (Oliva brought Chinese contemporary painting to the Venice Biennale in 1993), are recognized by Chinese official institutions such as the Artists Association. This leads to a peculiar phenomenon, that is, an art phenomenon that is driven by the market but lacks fundamental legitimacy in the art history of a country! Indeed, in the 90s of the 20th century, China's market economy developed rapidly, and it was almost swept up in the wave of globalization, which made it easy for Chinese artists to obtain a large number of images derived from advertising, television and other paths, and the concepts of "appropriation" and "revision" in contemporary art analysis also brought images and symbols from ancient and modern Chinese and foreign art history to today's artists, which led to the pure disintegration of the classification of images and symbols in the eighties and nineties. Due to the different circumstances and intellectual experiences of each artist, the element of "individuality", far from groups and stylistic currents, expanded rapidly from the second half of the 90s. It is difficult to find the same "identity" in later paintings, and it is true that at about the same time, Western contemporary painting also influenced and even interfered with the painting practice of young Chinese artists, such as Kiefer or Richter.
Shen Muyang, Civilized Past - Othello, mixed media on canvas, 200cm×200cm, 2023
However, in the era of globalization, the linear historical evolution is no longer characterized by the coexistence of multiple institutions and civilizational traditions, and despite the complex political, economic, cultural and civilizational conflicts, we cannot simply summarize the evolution of painting as a shift from sociology to iconography, or we should not turn to the futuristic logic with a more AI-controlled tendency because of the surging development of science and technology. Obviously, some analytical terms of art criticism may be difficult to use, such as "innovation" and "nation", "East" and "West", "avant-garde" and "locality", and even "tradition", in the context of the global flow of information, images and symbols are flying everywhere, the richness and dizzying diversity of images, coupled with the continuous influence of art history on artists, we can only find and even project newly established problem narratives from special painting objects.
Today, the expression of any route is at the same time, expressive, pictorial narrative, symbolic arrangement, or simply avoiding the smooth flat coating of brushstrokes—the kind of light and texture image strategies that are produced under mechanical or technical manufacturing conditions, which are difficult to describe in terms of "conceptual painting". It's tantamount to saying that painting is back to itself again.
Completely different from the representation function of the past, painting has opened people's horizons after modifying and even shaping our social and realistic images, and the reflection theory of realism in the past has been refuted by modernism. The reason why the "bad painting" that appeared before is meaningful is that there is a hidden painting strategy that resists conceptual painting. At the same time, the bad painting itself avoids the sociological meaning as much as possible.
Wang Yilong, Pause, oil on canvas, 120cmx180cm, 2023
The new paintings of the 80s and 90 generations of artists are not bidding farewell to art history, let alone "breaking" with the previous art history, on the contrary, they are simply using or classifying the existing image and symbol resources according to their own needs. It should be reminded that, based on the fact of the flow of objectively existing markets and globalization, a global language and expressive approach that naturally circumvents local and traditional logic is beginning to take on a universal character, and in this context, if not the imposition of ideology, the use of many critical terms begins to lose more and more psychological and realistic conditions. We need to have a set of terms that are appropriate to describe and characterize today's paintings.
All ready-made images are the artist's material, and for today's artists, perhaps the most important thing is not to "create" images or symbols, but to "arrange" and "reorganize" new images and symbolic worlds.
The artist is familiar with the materials and elements of painting, but where does the consciousness of color, line, brushstroke, and technique come from in the work? We are very aware that the Internet, self-media, and big data are influencing the creative thinking and methods of human beings today, and the cross-border of different media such as installation, video, readymade, animation, and the Internet strongly infects or interferes with the artist's mood, but if we reduce the thinking of humanities, society and history, it is easy to weaken the initiative in the selection and use of various images, and the images and symbols can easily become simple visual decorations.
Zhang Zhaoying, Life Props - Art Logistics, Oil on canvas, 175cm×205cm 2021-2022
The ability and agency of AI can lead to abundant image resources, and Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AI-Generated Content) is a liberation beyond the ability of individual production in terms of image resources, but can algorithms, whether special settings or general algorithms, determine the soul world of artists? From an operational point of view, whether the artist has control has become an important condition for the use of AI technology, and conforming too much to the derivative system of AI is tantamount to giving up the right to create. The new technical conditions have been known, even complete generative art is produced through computer programming and algorithms, and the random means in it can of course be controlled in the hands of the artist, but when the artist completely falls into the creation of generative art, it is possible to gradually lose people's free perception and subtle consciousness activities. When the effect of the algorithm fascinates the artist, it is easy to lead the artist to the black hole of the algorithmic world, which is a derivative of logical programs, and the individual consciousness as a natural person may gradually disappear. "Choice" is the creative movement of the brain in the process of using computer algorithms, the ideological power of the artist to synthesize and use (especially the humanities and history) knowledge ability, and the expressive ability to choose and coincide with the choice, which constitutes an important creative ability of global painting, just like the important artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian in the Renaissance hundreds of years ago, and the knowledge of perspective, anatomy, and geometry are just their means and tools. New technologies and their ideologies constitute the opportunities and challenges for artists, which are the basic background for the emergence of global painting. Today, if we want to keep painting from lacking vitality and vitality, we should be fully aware of the real situation and problems faced by artists engaged in painting creation.
David Xu, The Quarry, Acrylic on canvas, 180cmx500cm, 2016-2019
Art history is of course involved here. The question of whether contemporary art, of course, including painting, is a history is itself a question that researchers have been pondering. The reality is that history is written more quickly with adequate graphic information, rather than the fear of timely judgment leading to news stories that may disappear over time. In fact, there is little possibility of expecting the classics of the era to be like the modernist revolution of the first half of the 20th century, let alone the writing of art history from the Renaissance until the 19th century. Unlike in the past, the historical value of any artistic phenomenon, no matter what the starting point of the problem and the scope of its influence is, is the result of the identification of "contemporary" problems and the support of comprehensive resources, and the new historiography has long since handed over the judgment of history to those who summarize the problem in time. In any case, based on the historical experience of mankind and the growing civilization, we must believe that today's academic thought will not be limited to the simple judgment of the phenomenon that has just emerged, in which the operation of the curator and the cooperation with capital will effectively promote the emergence and development of new artistic phenomena. Today, the most effective factor comes from the idea in action, that is, to promote the growth of new art through different resources, and the researcher should be clear: contemporary history is a book in action
(Article from Art News Chinese Edition)
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