Artificial joint replacement surgery is a clinically effective treatment strategy for patients with severe joint diseases. Nowadays, artificial joints and cartilage are mainly made by metals, ceramics, polymer materials and strong hydrogels. However, these mentioned materials all encountered a common technical problem in harsh friction and shear environment, severe surface wear, which affects their service life. Therefore, it is of vital engineering importance and practical significance for using surface modification technology and biomimetic material design concepts to prepare a new type of artificial joint with the multi-performance of low friction, high load bearing and long wear resistance. First, this review summarizes the research and development of metal, ceramic, and polymer-based hard artificial joint materials. Then, the advantages of different surface modification technologies in improving the surface lubrication and anti-wear properties of artificial joint materials are listed, anchored in the perspective of reducing surface friction. Furthermore, the latest research progress of new biomimetic articular cartilage lubricating materials represented by hydrogel-based materials in recent years is introduced in detail. High-performance bulk hydrogel cartilage materials and surface modification of hydrogel cartilage materials are mainly included. In addition, the potential advantages of biomimetic layered structured hydrogel materials are emphasized as a new type of articular cartilage replacement treatment in the view of load bearing and anti-wear performance. Combined with the latest developments in bio-lubrication field, a systematic overview of the bonding methods of lubricating hydrogel coatings on the surface of natural bone tissue or hard artificial joint materials is involved in this review. Finally, based on the two aspects of bionic material design and surface water-lubricating modification, the future research focus and development direction of artificial joint materials are proposed in this review.