A term coined by art critic Li Xianting to refer to an art style in China, mainly focused in Beijing, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Cynical Realist artists were mainly born in the 1960s and thus experienced constant social, political and cultural turmoil. As the June Fourth Incident in 1989 declared the attempt to rebuild Chinese culture by introducing western modern art too idealistic, the artists felt disillusioned and discarded the metaphysical questioning and search for meaning prevalent in earlier art. With self-mockery, shamelessness, indifference and cynicism, they depicted themselves and the familiar, inconsequential, accidental and even absurd fragments of their surroundings.
