Splendidness Without Color

In oil painting, how to choose and use color is very important. From Western classical realist painting to scientific use of color in impressionism, oil painting has been presenting a colorful world to us all the time.Due to the influence of the contemporary western painting art and traditional concepts, contemporary Chinese oil painting has experienced a specific history. A group of artists emerge who only create works with monochromatic "black, white or gray". Their creation brings a special idea and freshness for the contemporary painting works.First, the phenomenon that "black" is the main form of color image in Chinese modern paintings is not by accident. It generally roots in the Chinese traditional ideas and thoughts. It is also affected by the traditional Chinese brush drawing and calligraphy. That definitely causes the trend of the "black" as the main color in oil painting.In addition, during China's economic market transformation and culture transformation, the Chinese society is gradually being integrated into the world's economy and culture, artists use "black, white and gray" to express the helplessness and self-restraint in the face of collapse of high profile desire for humanism; or depicting the control or anti-control of materialism on the society's spirit and lifestyle in the process of urbanization; or representing the inner impact on contemporary real life which used to act as image resources for collective public experience and memory; or recording the elegance, indistinct and confusion of the spirit in the events of no theme, no ideality or no idols.Artists are always making the same choices in the face of different specific situations and realistic scenes. The neutral colors such as black, white or gray have wide and solid mass foundation which fulfill the need of real creation and thus are always major options for a lot of contemporary Chinese artists with criticism and avant-guarde. Through analyzing the historical origins of "black, white, gray", different concepts of colors between China and Western countries, the character and symbolic meanings of the color itself, and the physical sense of reality that contemporary Chinese artists are hunting, and other aspects, this paper presents the creation concepts, historical cause of formation as well as the unique visual expressive force of this type of art works.