Ink Painting In Contemporary Art In The Context Of A Variety Of Possibility

The academic argument and theoretical discussion on the problem ofink painting, and the continuous reform and innovation of ink paintingcreation, are the China’s most interesting cultural phenomenon in the20th century.Since the May Fourth Movement, Chinese painting has gone throughanti-traditional attempt, and various attempts of breakthrough and newforms of expression caused by the Western artistic concepts. Ink paintingartists have done a lot of practice and exploration in the context ofmodern and contemporary art, and found their own way to extend and expandthe life of Chinese painting. In this process, we also saw the continuesdisputes on“pen and ink techniques”,“media”and the language andfate of Chinese painting in the context of modern and contemporary art,which were driven by theorists and critics. In the 1980s which is thebeginning of the contemporary art, Li Xiaoshan issued statements thatChinese painting was at the end of life, which woke up a group of artistsindulged in the traditional art. Was Chinese painting really at the endof life? How to create painting to break predecessors’restraints?Thinking on these issues became an important basis for the practice ofartists after the mid-1980s. These artists regarded“Deconstructing anddestroying tradition, Reconstructing new aesthetic space of inkpainting”as their responsibility. At the same time, there were a lotof interpretations and disputes among the theoretical circles, andvarious painting schools appeared such as“New Literati Painting”,“Modern Ink Painting”,“Experimental Ink Painting”and“ConceptualInk Painting”. From these topics, we can see that in the orientation ofdevelopment, modern ink painting has two overall features: develop from predecessor and learn from foreign. The disputes on the form, media,concepts and significance of ink painting reached a boiling point in the1990s. Especially the Wu Guanzhong’s article, which is named“Pen andInk Techniques Equal Zero”, caused great debate among artists andtheorists. We heard the sound of construction and criticism of variousvalue propositions, and saw the moving scene of various experiments oflanguage and form. Thus, this thesis analysis and review the evolutionof ink painting in the last century. Based on the combing of theory andcreation, we hope to see that ink painting can have multiple possibilitiesof existence, new aesthetic space and positive development direction.