Research On "pictorial Turn" Of Chinese Contemporary Oil Painting

With the development of economy and technology, images, such as photography, film, and advertisements, are affecting every aspect of contemporary culture and life with an unprecedented effort. The term "pictorial turn" belongs to the category of philosophy. The issue of "pictorial turn" was firstly raised by American scholar-W.J.Thomas Mitchell after the western philosophers' concerning about "linguistic turn". Mitchell provides convincing arguments for "pictorial turn" of the 20th century (especially the latter half of the 20th century) in his book -- Picture Theory. He believes that conclusive proofs can be obtained for "pictorial turn" from the anxiety about the visual reappearance and the fear and resisting about image, which come from philosophy and cultural theory. And "pictorial turn" this western philosophy term is used in this thesis to expound the new trends which presented by Chinese contemporary oil painting.In this article, the concept of "pictorial turn"of painting is just a loan one. It is manifested by two perspectives: On the one hand,with the arrival of image age, artist's visual experience changes, and in the oil paintings it appears as the changing of the form of the image tendency in paintings and the changing of artists' ideas. On the other hand, China has stepped into an consumer society which takes a unprecedented abundant of visual images as a cultural representation. There is no doubt that the changing of living conditions and culture form makes great impact on the artists' thoughts, what's more, it also directly led to the transform and innovation of the aesthetic taste and artistic expression of contemporary oil painting in China. The "pictorial turn" of contemporary painting has been a significant and widespread phenomenon under the contemporary cultural context.The first chapter defines the meaning of "pictorial turn" and interpret the beginning of "pictorial turn" in oil painting. Take the outside conditions of contemporary Chinese society, such as the development of cultural context, technology, and new media art, and the intrinsic motivation of contemporary Chinese painting as departure, the second chapter tries to analyse the reason of "pictorial turn" in Chinese contemporary oil paintings and emphasis the significance of intrinsic motivation for the change of Chinese contemporary oil artists' ideas. The third chapter classifys the status of the "pictorial turn" of Chinese contemporary oil paintings and tries to find the contemporary values of "pictorial turn" from perspective of cases of artists. The fourth chapter probe into the association between inherent contradictions and reality of "pictorial turn" of Chinese contemporary oil painting, that is, the "image tendency" actually contains a meaning of "counter-image", which ultimately leads to a quality surpass "image". It also alerts to avoid some extreme problems about "pictorial turn", such as vulgarization, neglect of techniques and lack of human values, which should be paid attention to in Chinese contemporary paintings.This paper is aims to trace the occurrence and the developing status of "pictorial turn" in contemporary Chinese oil painting. It reveals that the "pictorial turn" in contemporary Chinese oil painting not only appears as "image tendency" of painting, but also includes the changing of artists' ideas. This is not an accidental occurrence, but the embodiment of self-discipline in the developing of art. Several methodologies are adopted in this paper to clarify its views, namely, literature study, comparative study, case study and logical analysis. It hopes that the artists can rationally deal with the "pictorial turn" in Chinese contemporary oil painting, conbine the independent spirituality and critical spirit into one, consciously resist the of some extreme issues in creation, recognize that new possibilities may occur in every stage of developing of oil painting, grasp the spirit and significance endowed by the age, and create a new situation of the developing of contemporary Chinese oil painting.