"breath" After The Disappearance Of The Art

This thesis focuses on the "painterliness" of Gerhard Richter's "photo-painting". Using Walter Benjamin's notion of the dissipation of artistic "aura" as theorized in "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", this essay explores the social and cultural background of Richter's thought on the relationship between painting and photography, and analyzes his painting in the context of later developments in contemporary art.This thesis argues that Richter established a new foundation for "painterliness" Given that photography has imperceptibly come to organize and even control contemporary visual experience, and consequently artistic aura has dissipated, romantic nostalgia for the past must be overthrown, and our relationship to the world re-imagined. This is the meaning of "photography" in Richter's painting. Photography has usurped the representative function of painting, but painting retains the function of self-examination. By reconsidering the photographic mode of experience, painting can allow us to recover our sense of the reality of the living world, and not only liberate images but liberate ourselves. Critically examining the language and form of photography allows us to expand our understanding of the world.This thesis contributes two new approaches to the existing research on Richter. First, it combines a social and historical analysis of these works with an analysis of their linguistic form, a theoretical analysis with detailed case studies. It thereby overcomes the tendency of prior research to divide such analyses into discrete parts. Second, it relies entirely on materials collected, translated, arranged and analysed by the author himself, rather than using secondary sources. It thereby offers a significant contribution to the previously weak Chinese research on Richter.