Beauty And Ugliness Collide In The 1990s, The Evolution Of Chinese Painting,

1990s is a time when Chinese oil painting grew in a robust and various ways. Under enlightened and confident mentality, artists re-examined traditional Chinese culture itself and built a new platform for art value.In the first part of the thesis, I analyze that the development of economy and transformation of culture result in changes of living style, thinking concept and emotional status. During the process of transition, sensitive artists view daily life with an eye of reality. With changes of common customs, 'the ugly' and 'the absurd' appeared on the painting, meanwhile, the free development of personal characteristics and pluralism in appreciation of beauty has come into being.In the early years of 1990s, Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong representing a new generation of painters, setting a new art taste for Chinese oil painting at that time under the principle of 'respect the reality, respect the life'. This creative concept of 'come from life instead of above life' eliminated 'noble' and 'meaning', which dominated the art circle of 1980s. Such representatives of cynical realism as Fang Lijun and Yue Mingjun interpret life in a ridiculous, humorous way with exaggerating color and joking description. The position of riffraff character and anti-satire attitude towards life presented the youth's rebelling emotion during the period of cultural transformation. Some female painters represented by. Shen Ling and Chen Shuxia interpreting life with individual character. Their imaginary form and subjective color showed their pursuit for ideal art aesthetics. New-classicalism painters, Shi Chong and Leng Jun, revealed the meaning of image, and at the same time enlarged the field of realism from the western art visual angle. Taking western mode, painters of Pop Art combined revolutionary symbols, leader-figures and foreign posters, trademarks to form a kind of popular and ridiculous pattern. Some post-newborn painters in the late 1990s, however, like Xia Junna and Zhong Biao, poured out their emotion of romance with commercial pattern. Thus, the exploration of new esthetics in this transformation time began. In the second part of my thesis, through cases mentioned above, I discussed in detail the specific vision of 'the ugly' and 'the absurd' of Chinese oil painting in the collision between 'the beautiful' and 'the ugly'.The development of economy and transformation of culture result in changes of living style,thinking concept and emotional status. The cultural environments, which reflect the reality, have taken the place of the traditional morality concept. The inundant consumption culture makes the artists view daily life with an eye of reality. With changes of common customs, the free development of personal characteristics and pluralism in appreciation of beauty has come into being.The third part of this paper mainly analyzes the characteristics of Chinese oil painting in 1990s in three aspects: personal elements characters; base of western modern arts; influence of market and popular culture.During the short decade, artists describe a 'mundane world' instead of an 'ideal garden'; they deconstruct 'beautiful' and 'elegant' of traditional aesthetics with 'secular', 'ugly'. These painting came from the life but not above the life. The new concept of which affected by the western late-modernism lead not only to the beginning of collision of 'the beautiful' and 'the ugly', but to the broadness of the border of aesthetics as well.From the opposite angle of 'the beautiful' and 'the ugly'., this thesis try to analyze the artists' creative style and concept, and the evolution of Chinese oil painting on the basis of individual and daily life, eastern tradition and western concept. Through the analysis of typical examples, I realized that this kind of transformation not happened accidentally, but an inevitable trend of popular culture as well as development of fast-food consuming culture, and artists' personal realization of development of passing time. Only through successive creativeness and exploration, the acme of '...