Chinese avant-garde art until 1989 was an historical product of that special era. It “appropriated” Western contemporary art and endowed it with its own historical and cultural connotation. The juxtaposition of the elite appealing and the deconstructively post-modern scepticism constituted Chinese avant-gardian discourse at that time. The “Opening” political-economic context of the society virtually encouraged and now has digested the forms and concepts of Modernism which are calmly accepted today as one episode of art history, an enlightened experiment. To use the labels of Western contemporary social, cultural and artistic movements to describe Chinese Xiandai art will cause confusion, for Chinese art and Western art belong to different social and cultural systems. The outburst of avant-garde conception brought about impacts referring to basic questions as: what art is? What function does art have? Should contemporary Chinese art insist on identifying itself from the increasingly “globalized” art phenomena or merge into the western-centered main stream?