Rise and Fall of the ‘Sha Ma Te’ Subculture – “Li Yifan: The Heretical Light” Exhibition

Sha Ma Te (杀马特) originated from an online game coterie and was one of those subcultures in pursuit of idiosyncratic visual appearance. Emerging from the fringes of this trend, migrant workers in the coastal cities developed an even more melodramatic and more marginal popular culture on its very basis. From 2008 to 2013, the coterie of Sha Ma Te, the name of which is transliterated from the English word “smart,” had become synonymous with this subcultural trend as a result of its predominant popularity online.

After years of field studies on Sha Ma Te groups distributed in the coastal industrial area, Li Yifan completed his long documentary Sha Ma Te, I Love You. Through the oral accounts of the interviewees, the artist managed to reconstruct the process from the emergence of Sha Ma Te as a cultural trend to its years of decline and failure.

Li Yifan regarded the exhibition as an opportunity for the museum’s audience to know more about this community. In the film, he borrowed the statements of the Sha Ma Te to describe the life conditions and changes that young workers have encountered, and how they got to decline with the violence of public opinion. In the project, Li Yifan always entered as an ignorant, and then gradually discovered that the Sha Ma Te came from the isolation of young workers and the alienation from the mainstream life of the city. He so regarded the project as a disenchantment process, that the word Sha Ma Te well embodies.

On the other side of the exhibition, with numerous objects of daily life and hundreds of second-hand cellphones, Li Yifan reenacted the moment when workers took selfies in the heat of labor. Through this work, the artist tries to reconnect mutually segregated communities, to base artistic creation on a genuine perception of reality and thus to acquire a critical sensibility that has long been cherished in art.