Meet the Contemporary Chinese Artists Reimagining Painting Traditions

Two millennial Chinese men stare the viewer straight in the eye in Chen Fei’s life-size portrait entitled Friendship (2023). Based on the artist and his friend, both men have almost identical buzzcuts and wear the same attire, with a red tie and the word “comrade” engraved on each of their tie slides. Their modern haircuts and formal clothing seem to clash: They could either be two “bros” or two members of the same political party. The painting hints at China’s charged political past, combining Chen’s personal life with his identity as a professional Chinese painter.

Friendship is included in “A Cloud in Trousers: Painting Today,” a show of 23 paintings by Chinese artists at the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, organized in collaboration with Pond Society, on view through January 5, 2025. The show was named after a Russian Futurist poem of the same name, explained the exhibition’s curator Yuan Fuca, noting the original’s “romantic connotations of revolution, love, creativity, and everything all at the same time.” Bringing together contrasting images and themes simultaneously, the poem is particularly relevant to contemporary Chinese painting, where artists are blurring the lines between the traditional and the modern, the local and the global, the individual and the collective, to make sense of the complex reality they live in.

For some artists, this means facing the past head-on. Sichuan-born artist Hao Liang adapts the conventions of the traditional ink-on-silk guohua technique and references literature and philosophy by both Chinese and non-Chinese scholars throughout his practice. “I have been using texts as a source of inspiration for creation for a long time,” Hao told Artsy in an interview. “I resonate emotionally and empathize with ancient and modern times through reading, which allows me to look directly at the universality of human nature beyond the limitations of time.”

In Hut III (2016), for instance, he paints an unruly, flailing bundle of tied bamboo. It’s a stark contrast to traditional Chinese ink paintings, like in Zhao Mengfu’s Bamboo, Rocks and Lonely Orchids (1271–1368), where bamboo is shown growing gracefully. Here, Hao references this construction material that is no longer widely used in China. “When the ancients planted bamboo seeds, they had to consider the form of future buildings,” Hao said. “When we take a moment to consider bamboo through this lens of the past, it ultimately becomes a revelation of life and existence for us today.”

In Beijing-born artist Wang He’s Secretaire of Lin Hejing (2024), the past and present are directly contrasted. The work portrays the imagined desk of the Song Dynasty poet Lin Hejing, who was known for his love of plum trees and raising cranes. The desk displays a huge array of ancient artifacts—such as calligraphy and jade brush holders—with modern objects, including modelmaking paint and DIY plastic cranes. This scene creates a harmonious image where antiquity and modernity coexist. Wang’s painting reflects his own experience working with the past while living in the present, as he spent more than 10 years restoring ancient paintings and calligraphy at the Palace Museum in Beijing.

“A Cloud in Trousers” also presents artists who are directly breaking away from painting’s ingrained traditions, both Chinese and Western. For example, experimental artist Xie Nanxing rethinks the conventions around depictions of nature in his “Postcard” series. In Postcard No. 5 (2015), Xie layers two canvases and allows paint from the upper canvas to seep through to the lower one, leaving dotted traces of painting. The remaining specks of earthy greens and browns blotted across the canvas hint at a natural landscape through the traces of a faded image. “These dust particles are remnants of the original finished painting, revealing it and liberating it at the same time,” Xie told Artsy in an interview. Xie slowly removes each of his brushstrokes from the canvas and instead relies purely on chance to produce Postcard No. 5.

Unlike the idyllic landscape paintings of the Tang Dynasty or the realist scenes from the Flemish Renaissance, this work presents nature in its most pure and untouched form through its specks of “dust” or chén (尘) in Chinese—a symbol of earthly life and reality and a metaphor for both smallness and abundance. “Unlike with Georges Seurat’s precise color points, the dust is more subtle and uncontrollable,” Xie added. “The viewer has more space to participate in the conception of the painting.”

Sun Yitian’s large acrylic portrait of Medusa (2023) takes a different approach to depicting shared history with a personal spin. With her smooth skin and the apparently fake snakes around her head, the titular subject resembles a plastic Barbie doll, a commodified version of the Greek mythological figure. This reference to commerce is intentional: The inspiration for the painting stems from the artist’s childhood memory of seeing the snake-headed figure as the Versace logo on a backpack. While the original mythological figure turned her onlookers into stone with her gaze, Sun’s Medusa projects her own alienated gaze back onto her viewers, similarly subjected to today’s commodity culture and consumer society. It makes a striking contrast with the violent and confrontational scream of Caravaggio’s beheaded Medusa (1597).

The range of styles and narratives presented in “A Cloud of Trousers” is, in part, due to the different experiences of artists of different ages in China’s contemporary art scene. “Each generation of artists, from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, has had a different experience of China,” curator Yuan explained. “For example, those born in the ’80s found themselves in an ‘in-between’ space as they were the first generation to experience when China opened up and were suddenly exposed to different kinds of information, while artists born in the ’90s have fewer historical burdens.” The rapid changes that took place in China in the last 50 years have created new complex realities on both an individual and collective level, leading artists to try to make sense of these through different ways on the canvas.

For example, millennial figurative painter Wang Xiaoqu paints scenes that look at our current collective alienated state of mind, based on her experience living in modern Chinese cities such as Chongqing. In Chaos (2024), she shows a naked man sitting on an office chair as he drops pieces of paper onto the floor: an absurd yet somehow relatable scene. Wang explained that she’s hoping to capture the feelings of disconnection and weightlessness associated with living in a complex and turbulent reality in her work: “In the process of globalization, China is trying its best to shorten the distance with the developed world,” she said in an interview with Artsy. “It’s like chasing a time difference that is difficult to bridge, and individuals are caught in the huge gap caused by it.” The man sits alone as he experiences his inner turmoil engulfed in a sea of yellow, reflecting the turbulence and alienation of living in many cities today among the masses.

In contrast, Ding Hongdan, the youngest artist in the exhibition, paints a different picture of living in a cosmopolitan city. In 70 Queen’s Road Central (2024), she captures two fashionable women in conversation on the corner of a building in one of Hong Kong’s bustling streets, showing city life in its never-ending movement through the high-contrast colors reminiscent of digital flash photography. “I’d often visit Hong Kong because it was close to Guangzhou, where I grew up,” said Ding. “I was always intrigued by this place that existed in the gap between Eastern and Western cultures.”

While one woman is caught mid-sentence, the other is absorbed by her explosive thoughts, only revealed through the graphic symbols that surround her and recall those often found in comics. “Living in this gap leads people to struggle with reality and are left with uncertainty and confusion instead,” she added.