New Painting and Its Evolution

From the paintings of the first half of the 1990s, we can see a clear trend: it has become a popular trend in painting to get rid of modernism and its narrative character and to borrow ready-made images for creation. This trend formed a whole through the use of different themes and styles, allowing painting to transcend visual interest and highlight the importance of concepts and attitudes, as people began to use “New Painting” to express conceptual painting that was not limited to visual judgment. At the same time, a tendency to rediscover the temperament and interest of traditional painting from a contemporary eye has gradually become apparent, and this phenomenon is understood as an alienation from the logic of Western painting. In the new century, new painting became an important landscape. Artists who experienced the modernist movement in the 1980s and 1990s also participated in the trends of New Painting, and Zhou Chunya and Zeng Fanzhi are exemplars of this. At the same time, artists born in the 1980s and 1990s also offer more freedom in concept, taste, and technique.