Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

At the end of February, a group of youngsters with flamboyant hair colors “ambushed” Anfu Road. As a publicity campaign of a theatre play titled All Brothers within the Four Seas, the “ambush” didn’t really build much momentum for the play, but seemed to have brought shamate, a notion that seemed to have been sinking into oblivion for some time, back to public attention

The Chinese term of shamate is a transliteration of the English word “smart”, referring to a subculture once popular among young rural migrant workers in Chinaand known for low-cost yet outlandish fashion, hair styles and colors. Shamate ran wild in China in about 2008, and its members were fond of “Martian language”, active in dedicated online forums and offline spaces like hairstyling salons and roller rinks. Dramatic hair styles with varying levels of flamboyant colors plus idiosyncratic behaviors were enthusiastically sought after by this group of youngsters. Since around 2012 the trend to consume and crack down shamate emerged and gradually won anupper hand, leading to the disappearance of the shamate culture both online and in physical spaces. Many consider shamate members as clownish “others”. If we make a good search, we’d still find traces of the online “siege” of shamate. Back then the mass media fought against their aesthetics and even looked down upon this group of marginalized, often poor rural youths who felt at a loss in the face of the dynamic and drastically changing urban-rural relations
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More than a decade on from its “death”, the term shamate began trending again on Chinese social platforms in recent years and made its way onto the big screen. Since 2020, We Were Smart, a documentary directed by Li Yifan, has attracted quite some media attention and inspired discussions after being disseminated in a variety of ways. Afterwards shamate has further made its way onto the theatre stage. In a social context inundated with mixed modernity, when minority aesthetics encounter the mass public and when a subculture deemed “lowbrow and rural” made appearance on the highbrow theatre stage, what kind of special chemistry would be sparked?

What is shamate? What is contemporary art? What is socially-engaged art? How are they related? What is theatre play? What is documentary? What contents are worth recording and watching? What’s the biggest difference between the two art forms in the presentation of shamate culture? Li Yifan and Mark Zhuang Yi, directors of the documentary and the theatre play respectively, will have an after-screening discussion with audience after the screening of We Were Smart. Apart from academic discussions and analysis, in order to help participants to gain a better and more intuitive sense of shamate, we also invite Luo Fuxing, founder of shamate culture, to do hairs for the loving brothers of shamate – after all, it’s the must-have and most eye-catching symbol of the shamate family.

关于活动

2月底，一群顶着五颜六色头发的人在上海安福路“炸街”，一场话剧《四海之内皆兄弟》的宣传活动没有为剧目本身迎来太多关注，却让沉寂许久的“杀马特”家族又重新回到大众的视野之中。

杀马特音译自英语“smart”一词，泛指一种中国城市年轻工人中曾经风靡一时的亚文化潮流，以夸张而廉价的服饰、发型著称。杀马特于2008年左右兴起，喜欢使用“火星文”，活跃于QQ群、QQ空间、“劲舞团”等线上平台和理发店、溜冰场等线下空间，以夸张的发型和不同寻常的行为为标志，成为部分年轻人一时追捧的风潮。2012年前后，消费、打压杀马特的潮流逐渐替代杀马特风潮本身成为流行，网络骂战与现实生活中的捉弄、霸凌使得杀马特群体逐渐消逝。很多人心中的杀马特不过是滑稽的“他者”、是一顿快餐，那场针对“杀马特”的围剿犹能搜到一些带电子包浆的资料，彼时大众媒体以主流的高姿态斜睨甚至俯视着城乡关系里无所适从的青年蝼蚁。

而如今，杀马特复古回流大杀四方，先杀进“电影界”，从2020年开始，李一凡导演的纪录片《杀马特我爱你》经过各种方式传播之后被广泛地讨论和报道。现在又闯入“戏剧界”，在混合现代性社会里，小众审美走向大众视野，被喷“又土又low”的亚文化走进高雅的戏剧殿堂，到底能碰出什么特殊的火花？

到底什么是杀马特？什么是当代艺术？什么又是社会性艺术？他们之间到底有什么关系？什么是戏剧？什么是纪录片？什么内容才是值得被记录、被现场观看的？同样是对杀马特文化的呈现，这两种不同的呈现艺术最大的差别是什么？李一凡导演与庄一导演将在《杀马特，我爱你》的影片分享后对这些话题进行讨论。在活动现场，除了学术性的探讨和分析，为了让大家更好的了解杀马特，我们还将邀请杀马特创始人罗福兴，为现场爱杀马特的“兄弟”们做头发——家族必备时尚单品。