The thirty years of new era’s Chinese painting is a historical process of reflecting history, opening to the outside world and doing in-depth research. The end of an era push China society into an unprecedented historical transformation period of society and culture, which also brought unparalleled prosperity and flourish to development of Chinese painting. During the thirty years of new era, various new ideologies on judging existing state and outlook of traditional paintings have come into being and the development of Chinese painting has been put into a new historical context. The art of Chinese painting experiences the time of challenge to Chinese national tradition and adoration to western modern artistic thought in 1980s, and the time of value perplexity brought about by the strong art commercialization trend in 1990s.No matter it is western art worship or Chinese tradition speculation, for complex and diversified Chinese painting in 20th century, the sticking to its spiritual ideals, the reasoning and establishing to its cultural standpoint and value proposition has all the time expressed the promise in academic field of Chinese painting in new era. For Chinese paining to face its future, the academic premise is, undoubtedly, to make a review and summary to its works in new era, to smooth out variety of artistic phenomena, thoughts and ideas on it in new era. Therefore, Road of Chinese Painting in New Era?Retrospective Exhibition of Works from 1978 to 2008, co-sponsored by Chinese National Academy of Painting and National Art Museum of China, will be held from Nov. 28th to Dec. 4th, 2008 at National Art Museum of China.

This exhibition aims at displaying academic achievements on Chinese painting in new era and continually exploring the way of development of Chinese painting. Through exhibiting over 300 pieces of works in the show, we will try to let you personally trace the development and evolution of Chinese painting in the new era of China’s reform and opening to the outside world in the hope of enlightening more thorough thinking and inspiration.