| “Neo-Painting
from China” text by 黄篤（Huang Du）
In modern Chinese painting history, the main line dominating the process of history always are Chinese traditional painting and oil painting which is the unchangeable order in Chinese painting history based on the stable value system of French academic tradition and Soviet Union ’s realism. Facing with this artistic system, many painters tried to establish another independent artistic language which is different from the “orthodoxy” artistic discourse on the painting genealogy. Of course diverse and complicated information puzzles and influences painters ’ creative psychology in the transitional process of such an open society. Although it seems that painting today is walking toward “the ending”, the so-called “ending” doesn’t mean the death of painting but means the lack of the sense of orientation. In such a straying air, the painters such as Wang Yin, Chen Wenbo, Shi Jing, Qin Fengling have found a way to change! painting’s meaning. They have found, extended, transformed and constructed the new contemporary painting aesthetics from “folk painting” or “non-painting” or “photography” or “decorating design ” or “painting noumenon”. On the overall pattern of painting, they have the same aesthetic tendency which means a unique character of “Neo-Painting” emphasizing that painting is a philosophical expression, it isn ’t a pure objective representation but a reweaving of the world, a way to reunderstand the world. It represents the unreal and the fictional and is the convergence of the two. It redefines the aesthetic connotation of painting and anti-painting, realism and abstract, installation and designing, and painting and science. Therefore, the concepts of the works of the painters like Wang Yin, Chen Wenbo, Shi Jing, Qin Fengling not only break through the cage of the orthodoxy artistic system but also represent the visual method to “see” and “understand” things. In this sense “Neo-Painting” contains multi-layer meanings: painting is a game, the application of pattern, the coagulation of body movement, the subjective representation of obje! ct, the starting point of imagination, the spiritual illumination, and the amending of painting noumenon. Therefore, painting offers the aesthetic values to the human, the eroticism, the flowers, the daily environment and the psychoanalysis. So these “Neo-Painting” artists’ idea is to challenge to the dominant tradition of the visual art. In their own unique ways, each of them opens up a field of possibilities that has enabled us to think outside of the endgame exemplified by the painters of Political Pop Art and Cynical Realism in China. Recently contemporary Chinese painting is characteristic of concept ’s changing “viewing” method of painting, and the transformation of painting concept has subverted and transcended the painting style dominating Chinese avant-garde art. |
| 黄篤（Huang Du) Curator, Art Critic Huang Du is artistic director of The First Today’s Documents 2007 (Beijing Today Art Museum). Main exhibitions curated by Huang Du include: “The 6th Shanghai Biennale 2006”. “What is Mono-ha?”, “China Contemporary: New Urban Realities”(Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2006), “Chinese Pavilion of the 26th Sao Paulo Biennale 2004 ” and etc |