Main Concepts in Chinese Painting between the 1990s and Early 2000s
Resting on European and world experience of expressing an idea of an artwork, Chinese artists always included their own national tradition in the context of artworks. It led to re-conceiving European conceptions within their own culture and creating unique conceptions of painting. These include traditional (guohua) and new conceptions (conceptual art, cynical realism, political and cultural pop art, vulgar art, art of the Chinese women’s art). The development of contemporary art in China, like worldwide, has multiple vectors and multiple directions inside of which various conceptions can co-exist being in some ways contradictory to one another. It is difficult to introduce the classification of the spectrum of art conceptions in China. At the same time, it is possible to distinguish three main conceptual vectors in Chinese art: “from-sense-to-image”, “from-image-to-sense” and “from-understanding-to-sense”. Conceptions inside this three vectors existence and develop. All conceptions are in touch with traditional art rules and views: some of them oppose tradition, others rely on it, some of them try to compare contemporary art to tradition, and others try to challenge it. Due to these phenomena, Chinese painting managed to overcome the crisis of conceptual repetition and to avoid limiting the relevance of contemporary art to its superficial plane.