Exploring Memory, Identity, and Artistic Expression in Contemporary Chinese Painting Through Personal Memory Construction

Abstract

This research explores the imaginative and intellectual processes through which Chinese contemporary painters design visual expressions of memory. It is based on the theoretical framework of PMSC, which explains how six Beijing-based artists convert processed experience into pictorial composition, making memory the origin and content of the artistic production. The research evidences the way in which artists re-build autobiographical and collective memory using three complementary processes, i.e., fragmentation and reassembly of memory-scenes, intergenerational conversation, and self-referencing symbolism with the help of a qualitative interpretive design combining semi-structured interviews and an iconographic analysis. The findings reveal that memory is not a passive act of recollection but a dynamic cognitive reconstruction that mediates perception, affect, and cultural identity. By selectively recomposing personal and historical imagery, artists forge hybrid visual languages that navigate between tradition and modernity. This study posits that PMSC is a powerful explanatory model connecting cognitive movement to formal and symbolic innovation, transforming individual experience into aesthetic order. Memory-driven creativity has empirically emerged as a characteristic paradigm of Chinese post-socialist art, where memory reconstruction serves as an instrument of self-articulation and cultural survival. This research contributes to larger discussions in art history and creative cognition by illustrating how remembering can be a generative practice of meaning-making. We conclude that personal memory far from a static storehouse is an active process through which contemporary Chinese artists re-establish identity, negotiate historical consciousness, and reshape the aesthetics of painting in the twenty-first century.