Unconscious Mechanisms and the Formation of Sensory Self-Awareness in Contemporary Acrylic Abstract Painting: The Case of Li Jiang

Abstract

As contemporary abstract painting actively removes representation and narrative structures, it shifts the focus of pictorial practice toward color, form, and the sensory experience they constitute, thereby rendering the creative process itself a crucial dimension for understanding the work. On the basis of this shift, this paper takes contemporary acrylic abstract painting practice as its object of study and examines the operative mechanisms of the “unconscious” in pictorial generation within the frameworks of art history and formal analysis. Through a comprehensive analysis of material properties, painting methods, and pictorial formal structures, the study investigates how the unconscious participates in the generation of chromatic phenomena during the creative process and how it influences the stability of abstract form. The research argues that the unconscious should not be regarded as synonymous with irrationality or chance, but rather as a mechanism of intuitive judgment grounded in long-term training and the internalization of experience. Approaching the issue through generative processes and sensory structures helps to transform the unconscious from an experiential rhetorical concept into an analyzable mechanism of pictorial generation, thereby expanding the pathways for understanding both the practice and study of contemporary abstract painting.