New Literati Painting and Experimental Ink and Wash

The “emancipation of the mind” in the 1980s opened up people’s tolerance for cultural understanding, and while practicing Western modernism, Chinese painters also began to rediscover the spiritual temperament of traditional painting. Gradually, artists no longer chose between “avant-garde” and “conservative,” but what was important for the understanding of artistic richness and particularity. Although “New Literati Painting” was only a simple slogan used by some painters who lacked profound traditional skills, it also heralded the resurgence of the uniqueness of Chinese civilization, and those “experimental ink works” that were related to Western abstract painting were also an artistic phenomenon that re-interpreted the possibilities of calligraphy and painting from another perspective. Together, these phenomena led to a greater artistic openness among Chinese artists.