From the aspects of matter, system, behavior and cultural values, urban culture presents a feature of centralization and rationalization, which depressed humans perceptual existence. The city also provides a variety of commercialized and provocative material forms, and the “wanderers” , who represent the attempt of human beings to pursue sensibility, emerge as the times require. Under the rationalization of urbanization, they try to maintain their artistic ways of existence. Therefore, they become a special perspective to investigate modernity. The rapid development of contemporary Chinese urbanization and the drastic change of ideas provide conditions for the generation and growth of Chinese wanderers, and the latter has become a microcosm of contemporary Chinese modernity. Wanderers in Chinese contemporary literature can be divided into two groups according to the time and spirit: subject character wanderers in 1980s and nonsubject character wanderers after 1990s. The former can be classified as the rebellious form and the game form; meanwhile, while the latter can be classified as the searching form and the peddling form. These heretical images in modernization process drew the outline of aesthetical survival in modern China through their ideology, behavior pattern and value seeking.