On May 22,¡T"Towards a New Image:Twenty Years of Contemporary Chinese Painting "opened in China Finearts Museum in Beijing.This is one of the most important exhibitions on contemporary art in the history of Chinese fine arts.

Seventy works by 20 most famous contemporary artists are on view.The curator is Weng Ling,Director of Beijing Contemporary Visual Art Development Co.Ltd. The exhibiton will travel to Shanghai,Chengdu and guangzhou.

The history of contemporary Chinese oil painting reflects the great richness and complexity of this period of cultural change in China.Especially since the 1990s,this complexity has been expressed not only in the impact it has had on the traditonal methodology and stylistyc modes of realism,but also in the ways it has used conceptualist methods to more completely and deeply interact with the multiple levels of Chinese cultural history and social reality.Just like other mediums of contemporary art,oil painting has become an intrinsic force in the construction of contemporary Chinese culture and social criticism.Today,China's representative artists have not only gained increasingly broad prestige for Chinese contemporary art and culture intrenationally,the mere fact of their existence powerfully proves the openness of Chinese contiemporary culture.

What is the significance of an exhibition of all the most important oil painters of the past twenty years?It is not merely a look back at the visual revolution that has taken place in contemporary China,it is also a sort of academic reordering of the art of Chinese contemporary oil painting.The works of these representative contemporary oil painters provide visual historical materials to aid in our observation of the richness and complexity of contemporary Chinese culture.