CategoriesStyles and Movements
Cynical Realism
Chinese painting of the early 1990s whose bald, grinning or yawning figures met the mood after 1989 with irony and deadpan humour.
No works indexed yet · 6 related artists
No open-access works for Cynical Realism are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Cynical Realism took shape in Beijing after the suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, when the idealism of the 1980s avant-garde gave way to disillusion. The critic Li Xianting gave the tendency its name. Its painters turned the academic figure painting they had learned towards boredom, absurdity and aimlessness instead of heroism.
Fang Lijun painted shaven-headed young men yawning or shouting against empty skies and water. Yue Minjun repeated his own laughing face, eyes shut and teeth bared, across crowds of identical figures. Liu Wei painted relatives and soldiers in slack poses and garish, loosely handled colour. Zeng Fanzhi, slightly apart from the group, moved from expressionist hospital scenes to his Mask series, begun in 1994, in which city dwellers in suits hide behind pale masks. The style overlapped with Political Pop and became one of the most recognisable faces of Chinese art abroad in the 1990s.
Related artists
More in Styles and Movements
Dada
Dansaekhwa
Danube School
Dau Al Set
De Stijl
Deconstructivism
Deutscher Werkbund
Die Brücke
Documentary Film
Documentary Travel Photography
Dusseldorf School of Photography
Dutch and Flemish
Early Computer Art
Early Renaissance
East Village Art
Emerging Art
Expressionism
Fashion Photography
Fauvism
Faux Naïf
Feminist Art
Feminist Art and Contemporary Feminist
