History is not a computer. It unfolds in the mind and imagination. He is embodied in various forms of expression of a national culture. He is a subtle intermediary between material reality, economic reality behind it and solid objective reality. -Basile Davidson, Modern Africa

The language representation of China's contemporary new paintings coincides with the undercurrent of chaos and transformation of contemporary art and society in China, from scar painting, local painting, rational painting in 1980s, snobbish and cynical realism in 1990s, political pop painting, gaudy painting and so on. With the change of social structure in China, contemporary art in China has changed from the ideal of modernization in 1980s to the globalization of market and consumption in 1990s. With the advent of commercial times and the information age, capital and market have become new myths. The profound changes in the economic system have also profoundly changed our politics, culture, life and art. It is complicated and difficult to interpret China's contemporary art in this turbulent and enthusiastic chaotic scene. The materialism of collectivism, the collapse of traditional context, the general loss of contemporary people's spirit, and the mixture of global market and post-socialist political and economic transition period have brought great impact and changes to everyone in China, showing a magnificent scene of ruins and desolation and prosperity of construction sites. These constitute the basic features of China society today. This paper attempts to reveal the spiritual symptoms and the change of aesthetic characteristics of contemporary China society in the language of artistic noumenon from the visual language expression of contemporary new paintings in China since 2000.

The modernist appeal of "grand narrative" in the 1980s and the disappearance of symbolic political myth in the 1990s, the collectivism trend of thought ceased to exist, and the collectivism experience was transformed into personal experience. Individual differences in life have replaced the historical experience of "grand narrative" of times, countries and regions. With the advent of the era of "popular culture and micro-politics" (1), no one can grasp the whole of this era, and we are just one link in countless fragments. With the arrival of "micro-narrative", the rest are artists' individuals and cases, and the universal contemporary art experience and methodology that grew out of the scene are becoming more and more international. In the past, contemporary art in China overemphasized the characteristics of sociology and Orientalism, thus losing the ontological appeal of artistic language. Cultural experience and artistic language growing in local reality are becoming more and more important, and the process of contemporary art has also developed from learning and drawing lessons from international art trend information to self-discovery, cleaning and summary. This reflects the consciousness of contemporary social process and cultural evolution in China, and the paradox of rapid economic growth and cultural poverty. Let the intellectual and cultural circles rethink the relationship between our modernization road, historical context and localization experience. Only countless valuable artist cases will flow into the torrent of art history and the depth of contemporary culture. However, the state has never sponsored and supported contemporary art, and the status of contemporary art has always been in a folk and underground state. With the advent of the era of globalization, many overseas academic and commercial institutions, such as art galleries, foundations and galleries, have done a lot of introduction work for the promotion and dissemination of contemporary art in China. With the massive involvement of international capital and China private funds, the artistic space and artistic ecology have become three-dimensional and rich. Contemporary art space and institutions are spreading, which makes the art market continue to heat up. For example, since 2002, Beijing 798 has gradually attracted the attention of the public and domestic and foreign media, and has become a new frontier of Beijing's cultural fashion and a landmark of contemporary art trends. These cultural landscapes constitute today's cultural facts, and they are gradually changing our cultural process. In particular, some international galleries have entered China in an all-round way, which has opened up a new road for the internationalization of the art market ecology. Today's contemporary art stage in China is the battlefield of neoliberal order and global economy and culture.

No matter whether it is business or academic, everyone can't escape the ruthless trial and test of time. Is the bubble market or the inner power of art promoting the development of art today? If art is still meaningful today, perhaps it is our questioning and questioning of this collapsed and fanatical era, our visual coding of the information in this chaotic era, telling future generations all kinds of spiritual traces of us today ... but who is still questioning history, questioning scenes and questioning personal hearts? Does art still have magical power to travel through time and space? What happened to contemporary art?

In the middle and late 1990s, the "competition system" of the global biennale made installations, behaviors, images, photography and multimedia develop rapidly, and painting was under unprecedented pressure for a time. Painting was excluded from avant-garde art, and advanced tool theory was one of the most important topics in that period. The diagnosis of "painting death" was pronounced for a long time, and the surviving paintings produced "antibodies". The new painting widely absorbs the elements of installation, photography, video, network, multimedia and other media in contemporary art, and mutates into another new video tool. Painting is no longer a static observation and meditation, but has a wide connection with today's media. Today's painting has become a universal contemporary art media. Just as the birth of photography subverts the documentary function of painting, leading to the conceptualization of language structure and the changes of surrealism and psychology, there are also many artists who imitate painting with photography, such as Jeff? Jeff Will's conceptual photography is a reinterpretation and interpretation of the classic images in western painting. We see that more painters regard painting as an independent image production tool, and painting is also re-integrating the visual experience of other media with the narrative methods of images and concepts, establishing a new image rhetoric, or looking for a new methodology in the historical context. From the subject matter and language, the comprehensive experiment of painting ontology is being carried out, or it is an extension after breaking the boundaries of painting, and the concept of multiple characteristics is superimposed, which becomes obscure and visually more aggressive. Painting is no longer a static meditation in a museum like great thoughts and philosophy. Today's painting, like this era, presents unprecedented chaos, and the epidermis on the surface and the cells inside the painting are mutating. The era of information and network has changed the basic way of watching images and painting, and the visual expression of images has replaced great thoughts and philosophy. We see the extension and expansion of the painting boundary, and the new painting becomes unknown, uncertain and full of traps. This is the most basic feature of today's painting, especially in the language of new painting. The boundaries of today's painting are extending, and the structure and language are changing, from a single clue to the overlap of multiple spaces and narrative clues. The code of today's painting is difficult to decode, and we can no longer roughly explain today's painting with symbolic and political elements. In 1990s, the eschatological aesthetics of British YBA generation about decadence, trembling, agitation and violence had a strong impact on the classic contemporary art aesthetics in 1980s! The new Leipzig school in Germany presents the language characteristics of the socialist college. In their new painting language, it is popular, daily, the interweaving of patterns and messy spaces, the conflict between old and new, and the mixture of reality and image narration, which is far from the linguistic characteristics of the historical grand narrative of new expressionism. China's contemporary new painting is also undergoing such changes: it has moved away from grand narrative, anti-symbolization and anti-politicization, and entered the era of personalized, microscopic and fragmented deconstruction images.

I want to reveal and present the methodological and aesthetic turn under the image and language, as well as the mental symptoms of contemporary China society through the linguistic representation of contemporary China's new paintings. The new painting absorbs the visual experience of equipment, images, multimedia, mass media and other media. They extend from sociology, historical context, contemporary scenes, pixel image era, network, animation, comics, popular culture and so on. The boundary of painting is being broken, and painting, as the other, has returned to the stage of contemporary art.