ART TALK | Living with Sha-ma-te, China's most misunderstood subculture

In this highly distinctive and eye-opening event, artist Funa Ye (叶甫纳) introduces her ongoing research and art project which works with the most misunderstood subculture in China today -- The Smarts, aka Sha-ma-te/杀马特. Her talk will contextualise this movement within suburban creativity, youth subculture groups and Chinternet in contemporary China.

Smart (杀马特, pronounced as Sha-ma-te in Chinese) People are a post-Internet folk art force that has risen along with the popularity of online spaces in urban and rural areas of China. Influenced by numerous foreign pop culture phenomena – punk, goth, Japanese and Korean visuals - they have been shamed by Chinese urbanites for their wild hair, with some calling them "tasteless and low-brow." Made by Chinese rural youths born in the 1990s and found primarily in southern factory towns, they have invented colourful and unusual aesthetics made of seemingly random elements such as wigs, crowns, and motorcycles. The Smart People are the product of the paradoxical transition from rural tradition to urbanization.

After a field study which involved diving into the Smart community, living, negotiating and collaborating with them, Funa has created a series of participatory art projects in collaboration of the Smart movement's "godfather" Luo Fuxing.

Developing the idea further, Funa Ye proposed the concept of Mastr (玛仕特, pronounced as Ma-Shi-Te in Chinese) as a hybrid of Smart People and ethnic Chinese minorities. Coming from the English word "master," it obtains the new meaning of "future master" when used in Chinese, an expression also used to describe children in socialist countries. Underlining a sense of community and belonging, it also refers to the slogan "be your own master," a shared aspiration and mantra of young migrants from Chinese rural areas, both online and IRL.

Video recordings of this series will be screened on-site, and a limited number of publications and prints will be available for sale after the talk.

About the speaker:

Funa Ye is an artist based in Beijing and London. She is currently doing a PhD in the Slade School of Fine Art and teaching Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

Funa's practice is mainly concerned with the relationship between the realities of everyday life, the perceived connection between authority and many areas of social life such as different power structures, ethnic groups, and the fictional space of propaganda for the concept of ‘perfection’ in an ideological system, and utopian landscape. The work of Funa is rich in reference, parody and irony of uniformity in different subcultures/groups. Recently Funa has become a social activist. She is organizing internet-based participatory, crowd-sourcing projects, such as Exhibitionist: Curated Nail, Peep Stream and Smart gallery. She is using the internet to work with people, questioning how the art system may be incorporated into our private lives and social activities.

Speaker's website and Instagram ,

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