Cross-cultural Interaction Of The Contemporary Painting

20century German artist, Gerhard Richter, and the Chinese artists Zhang Xiaogang both have paintings referencing photography, and adopt broadly similar realistic style and flat coating techniques. At present in China, the prevailing view within art criticism and research field believes that as a representative of many Chinese artists, Zhang Xiaogang imitates Richter. This paper first separately inspectes important works of the the two artists from their source of images, and analyzes the reasons why they choose specific subjects in art creation, and thereby give summaries respectively to the features of the twp artists. The borrow of photography in Richter’s paintings looks like imitation to the way of representation of photography, but actually it is insistence to the unique spirit formed in the development of western painting history. This spirit has extremely rich connotation, and Richter focuses on three fundamental issues: rational value judgment, the classic themes of thumanities, and the reliability of representation of reality in the painting. Zhang Xiaogang’s reference to photo, from the application form the composition of family photographs and its implied structure of the interpersonal relationship to the staticition of image in photography, shows throughout all his graphic works. The memory of social and political reality is his repeated theme. Early days, he focused on the exploration of the decisive influence of individual survival under the ruling of totalitarian, conveying the pain in memory mainly through the image of light patch and the implication of hierarchy. In the recent decade, he has turned to reflect on the reliability of memory, keenly pointing out that memories are tampered arbitrarily of the consumption behavior in contemporary life, and its vulnerability can be seen from the unlinked gap between historical reality and itself. In this premise, the angle of view and methods of cross-cultural art research are applied in this paper to break the cultural identity hypothesis of traditional comparison study, and to form new inspection of the similarities and differences from social and individual characteristics of the two artists, from the exchange and interaction of cultural formation process. Eventually it comes to the conclusion that their true similarity is the explicit attitude against totalitarian politics, not merely in form and style.