In many respects, these exhibits represent a developmental direction of contemporary painting over the past few years. When we talk of bad painting in its literal definition it suggests that it falls short of standards or norms, that is to say those standards and norms established by artistic canons of theory, academicism and Modernism.
Bad painting is by definition the anti-thesis of good painting.
Neither the traditional techniques of classical painting or the visual constructs of modernism are the goal of this form of painting. It breaks the norms of painting while it expresses, in its own way, social consciousness, mostly in the form of personal experience, social criticism and states of existance. Bad painting made its debut in China in the 1992 Guangzhou Bi-annual. Li Luming used symbols in an abstract composition. Both artists' works represented the first signs of conceptual art in China.