This study examines the emergence and development of the representative Chinese avant-garde art, Post-89 Art, and analyzes the achievements and limitations it left for Chinese art. Post-89 Art is an art movement that emerged in the late 1980s, which was the period the Chinese society experienced a drastic change between ideal and reality. Among them was Cynical Realism, which became the portrait of Chinese intellectuals after the Tiananmen Incident, portrayed the self-reflection and skepticism against the Idealism of the 1980s. Also, as China entered the age of consumerism without sufficient political reform in the 1990s, Political Pop expressed the phenomena of “significance collapse”arising in the manner of “dissolution of significance.” After the emergence of China’s socialist market economic system, they pushed through with survival and development strategies using the market system, and they have pressured the official(Guanfang) art system and induced system reform. However, they also created various limitations and side effects in the process. Following this statement, this study has observed Post-89 Art has the following achievements and limitations: First, it achieved some degree of pluralization in terms of reform of Chinese art and artistic systems but failed to reach the level of active democratization; Second, it made significant contributions to market development and prosperity in terms of nurturing the artistic system but also hindered the balanced development of Chinese art; Third, although it laid the groundwork for international exchanges by establishing contemporary language, thought and sensibility, their ambiguous and strategic political attitude, which ironically was unlike their political image as shown ostensibly, only generated confusion and critically impairing its significance. Claire Bishop’s article ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’(2004), on the other hand, suggests the negative feeling such as antagonism should be needed into consideration for the interactive relations, pointing out rather the simplistic and positive articulation of relational aesthetics. ‘Relational Antagonism’ put forward by her is more realistic and complicated concept, which can explain the uneasy but significant meaning out of the works of Stantiago Sierra and Thomas Hirshhorn.
This research has been launched for tracing the discursive trajectory of art history and art criticism since the 1980s up to the present. The main topics and key issues brought up by the crucial publications have been highlighted in order to get hold of the mainstreams getting through the multi-layered and diverse art practices during the last three decades.