This essay examines, from the perspective of the Lacanian/Zizekian psychoanalytical theory, how Chinese avant-garde art expresses traumatic affect in the kernel of the Real in a distorted and fragmentary manner. The essay starts with a study of the history of contemporary Chinese visuality, and discusses how the symbolic superego in mainstream visual works (including political propaganda in Mao's age and commercial advertising in the post-Mao age) contains surplus enjoyment with self-deconstructive potential. The main part of the essay analyzes how the works of Wu Shanzhuan, Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi, Fang Lijun, Wang Jinsong, Liu Dahong and other avant-garde artists conjure up, from the symbolic system of mainstream visuality, phantom images in the deep depth of memory, to identify historical trauma as a spectral recurrence. Chinese avant-garde art is a mixture of revolution and carnival, hero and hooligan, folly and wit, pain and pleasure, passion and ennui, forming an ironic expression of the traumatic memory.