Art Patent Office: Yang Zhichao Archives

                                                                                                                                                                            Gu Zhenqing

   Is art museum the pantheon of art or the art patent office?

   When entering art museums of Europe and America, you would see that the masters have already been on an ordered list of art history. The Euro-America art system governed and classified the developing logic of global visual culture. From the classical to the modern, master pieces and labels of artists are just like their personal memorial tablets and inscriptions, which marked out their names as originators of some formal style in the Euro-America art system, and their donation in filling certain gaps.If we regard various art images and symbols in the study of art history as art patent archives first created by artists, the artists’ names undoubtedly correspond to them. For this reason, some artists from developing countries often take the authoritative museums and collection institutions in Europe and the US as the patent office’s sample showrooms of formal language of arts. Almost every formal language has been labeled the nametag of a European or American master. On this thinking dimension, the art patent office is already established.If the art museums of Europe and America are art patent offices, and biennale document committees are patent censorship committees, then the travel-soiled Euro-America curators to China are similar to those vice-director-leveled researchers and section inspectors of the patent office. No wonder that once they enter some “royal” academic oil painting master’s studio they will murmur Freud; when entering another master’s studio, they murmur Richter; and when entering another young famous conceptual oil painter’s exhibition venue, they murmur Luc Tuymans.

   However, if we paranoidly take the uniqueness of the motive and form of art creation as the only demand of innovation, the existence of art patent office becomes very questionable. The boundaries and possibilities of art innovation should be infinite, but the establishment of patent rigidly restricts the extension of thinking. Today, with more and more self-proclaimed artists becoming information collectors, the suspicion probability of copycat works are growing rapidly. In this era of rampant copycatting and vulnerable dignity of originality, artists have no choice but to think on the problems which are of great realistic significance, such as how to formulate and establish new rules of the game, how to judge the Monkey King and its fake avatar, and who carries out and supervises the authentication of “art patent”.

   The reason for taking “Art Patent Office: Yang Zhichao Archives” as the first solo exhibition of Art Patent Office project is that looking back on the art exploration and practice history over the years, Yang Zhichao has always been seeking the possibility of innovation and breakthrough. As one of the early practitioners of individual performance art in Chinese artists, the thread of thought presented in his art archive is extremely clear. The focus on the body and the social value of personal experience is the most distinctive discourse feature of his works. Except those “hard” works which arouse heated discussions, Yang Zhichao’s cartoon creation has been rarely discussed because of his low-key attitude, but the topics he tries to explore in the works stick to a kind of position and attitude based on universal values. In the process of humorous narrative, the social image is developed without traces. These cartoon creations reveal the artist’s cynical game mentality and are also closer to his cognition on the real, independent personality of his own.