For the latest generation of painters, their lives and creations are shaped in the general context of globalization, marketization, diversification, and technicalization. Having thrived and matured in the new millennium, these painters evade special recognition or unified definitions. In the past few years, some critics used terms such as cartoon, style-at-ease, or bad painting to frame certain pieces of their practice. But as new phenomena in the artistic field have to be examined through criticism and placed in the continuum of art history, a systemic theoretical expression remains to be formulated.
For new art forms, the critical examination must involve both theoretical and historical perspectives. It can be noticed that the paintings from artists born in the 1980s and 1990s present a globalized landscape. Influenced by the contemporary dissemination of information, artists in any city on this earth - whether it is New York, London, Paris, Beijing, or Shanghai - seem to share a similarity: the images created by them demonstrate a globalized stance and attitude, which stems from cultural convergence and overlapping of visualized experiences induced and hastened by globalization. Second, for artists, personalized differences parallel the trend of globalization and personalized aesthetics foreground the cultural DNA. Faithful to their feelings and judgments, young artists put their focus on the immediate, present, and private experiences, turning their faces from grand narratives to intimate, individualized silhouettes.
Third, a thirst for freshness: the latest generation of painters yearn to share and co-construct the vivid scenes of daily urban life and grasp the sentiments roofed in them. They believe in their intuition, by which the events happening in the real world are depicted. Fourth, their practices defy definition. It seems difficult, if not divisive, to position these young artists and classify these new phenomena by any established style or genre. Fifth, the gradual demise of nationalism. The social context provides these painters not with regional problems that assert themselves in certain areas but hybrid ones that combine the local and the global: the creation of artists integrates into the material exchanges and technological trends in the globe; they must react to the problems of the local, but they are also required to find their postures and gestures in the myriad of globalized values. Sometimes the source of an image and its expression lie in the distance.
It can be said that these artists benefit from the rapid and inevitable development of globalization and marketization. They observe the changing world, thus emphasizing the dynamism of painting language, paying equal attention to image and text concepts and expressions. Sometimes, techniques also give birth to new ideas and concepts. The fragmented presentation of their sentiments is nothing but a testament to the reality of this era: thanks to the diversified cultural context, individual voices are all accepted as authentic displays of history, and these voices are mingling into a new reverberation.
On this foundation, we are observing and writing new art history.