Beijing Commune is pleased to announce the opening of Zhao Yao's solo exhibition "I Am Your Night" on June 12, 2011. The show will last until July 31, 2011. The first solo exhibition of Zhao Yao at Beijing Commune, the artist is showing a series of installations and paintings lately produced.

This exhibition differentiates itself from today’s common idea about the exhibition system. Taking the viewers response as a part of his strategy, the artist explores into the forming and communicating of a concept in a seemingly ridiculous way. It can be regarded as a question or the starter of a discussion: in an exhibition system composed of a series of established concepts, does “interpretation” serve, in fact, as an access to the information or the barrier?

This visually rich exhibition is composed of paintings and installations (including video installations). The A Painting of Thought series are Zhao Yao’s first paintings. On the found fabric with various patterns, he painted geometrical forms with intense, contrasting colors. These works, seemingly tantalizing the viewer to associate them with abstract paintings, are never the presentation of the artist’s aesthetics or formal exploration of abstract art, instead, they are the destruction of such practice or way of understanding. This geometrical forms which look like with significance or concepts, are a random selection from an exercise book of mathematical problems. Zhao Yao doesn’t even make any change to this math problem except for giving them colors. The patterns on the found fabric and the twisting effect of the cloth produced in the framing process are hinting the viewers in a disturbing way about the paradox of the paintings. Besides the paintings, the installations on show in the exhibition are based on the same discussion: the legitimacy of an art work in a context where there have been enough “shared criteria” on what is art or what is the necessary link between the form and the idea behind it.

Zhao Yao, who seems to be more interested and sensitive in visual information than his peers, tends to be more self-reflective in analyzing and judging of such information. It is, perhaps, extremely hard to offer a new form or idea to world’s contemporary art scene where new ideas are happening all the time and new information is transmitting to people in almost no time, however, the effort of an artist made to the reflection of art as an institution, instead of a presentation of a concrete idea, is still meaningful.

Born in 1981 in Sichuan, China, the now Beijing-based artist Zhao Yao graduated from the Department of Design Arts of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Starting from 2005, Zhao Yao has been attracting increased attention in the art scene. His works include photography, video, installation and painting and have been shown on both domestic and international exhibitions.