The Pack Is the Painting: Evil Biscuit and the Schizocollage Movement Come to Hong Kong

In 1956, at an exhibition hall in Tokyo, a Japanese artist named Saburō Murakami ran through a row of paper screens, leaving a torn, human-shaped hole in each one. The audience heard the rip in the moment but likely didn’t understand it.

Murakami belonged to Gutai, the radical postwar avant-garde collective whose members painted with their feet and fought with mud, and his gesture made an argument the art world is still digesting, but ultimately the tearing and the wreckage after were the actual artwork. 

Seventy years later, the ripping hasn’t stopped. Trading card livestreams, Discord server groups, collector markets of all sorts, gambling/flipping, and nostalgia freebasing. Layered detritus. The artist named Evil Biscuit seems aware of this. 

If you haven’t heard of Evil Biscuit, you may not have been watching one of the strangest and most vital corners of internet art. Over the past few years, a scene of mostly pseudonymous artists, formed across crypto subcultures, Twitter timelines, and private group chats, has been quietly staging one of the more genuine artistic rebellions of the decade.

Where the establishment crypto-art world courted galleries with polished generative work, these artists went the other direction. Images so dense with meme references, anime, veiled art history, and internet debris that critics had to invent new words for them. They called the style schizocollage or traitmaxxing, a practice of taking the trait system that generates ordinary avatar collections and pushing it past its breaking point, hundreds of layers deep, until the image verges on chaos.