Smart, Mastr 杀马特，玛仕特

 

 

Exhibitionist：The Smart Gallry/ Installation &live evnet/ C5cnm space，Beijing/ 2021

From ancient times to the present, hair carries secret and rich meaning. “Hairstyle” can be expressed as a form of resistance of individuals to mainstream values, a “movable temporary device”, and a gesture and action that is better than a speech. In subcultural studies, playing with hair (making art) can also be seen as a form of shame, a sign of self-exile, and a symbol of tension between the dominant group and the subordinate group.

The purpose of Exhibitionist Series is to break the boundaries of “daily display” and “art exhibition”, and to reduce the distance between the public and contemporary art. In our current hyper connected society, people’s desire to “display” is everywhere- selfies, Insagram, Wechat, and in its most extreme form-Live Stream. As a global online culture with a fundamental desire to expose and to peep, Live Streams occupy a space where visual expression and textual feedback are instantly accessible. This live space parasitizes online, and becomes the way of displaying and self- expressing for new generation.

 

Exhibitionist: JinFeng Roller Skating Club/ Installation &live evnet/ Tank Shanghai/ 2021

 

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One-day tour in Shanghai/ 2023. 2

Mastr, You Are Marvelous!

Master, You Are Marvelous! is a performative video work that investigates the paradoxical relationship between artistic labor, mechanical labor, and the cultural figure of the “master.” Developed as part of my long-term engagement with the Sha Ma Te (SMART) community of rural migrant youth in China, the work stages an encounter between marginalized subcultural subjects and the so-called “masters” of the art world.

In collaboration with artist Wang Qingsong and local artisans in Jingdezhen, the film depicts a fictional scenario in which a “Master” and a group of flamboyantly styled Sha Ma Te youths arrive in a town known for its art. They visit established artists and artisans—figures who embody institutional prestige and official recognition. In the process, admiration, parody, and absurd intimacy blur the lines between subcultural “outsiders” and cultural elites.

This work critically examines the body politics of migrant labor. The Smart subculture originated among young factory workers on the urban peripheries, whose self-styling practices transformed the anonymity of mechanical labor into a carnivalesque assertion of presence. By placing these figures into dialogue with art-world “masters,” Mastr, You Are Marvelous! questions the mechanisms through which artistic labor is valorized, celebrated, and fetishized, while the material conditions of working-class laborers remain invisible or dismissed.

The project also plays on the multiple meanings of the word “Master.” In Chinese cultural discourse, it is both an honorific title for officially sanctioned artists and artisans, and a marker of elitism, authority, and intellectual hierarchy. In socialist rhetoric, “future masters” described the collective aspirations of children as the heirs of society. In global English, “master” also recalls the histories of domination, servitude, and property. By collapsing these meanings, the work destabilizes the boundaries between “high” and “low,” “elite” and “grassroots,” and asks who can claim mastery in the cultural field.

Through absurdist performance and visual parody, Mastr, You Are Marvelous! reveals the contradictions of how artistic labor is framed: at once exalted and abstracted, while other forms of labor—mechanical, affective, migrant—remain undervalued. It suggests that the celebration of the “Master” in art is itself a labor performance, one that masks systemic inequalities and exposes the precarious condition of cultural workers in both the factory and the gallery.

In the context of InVisible Culture’s issue on “(Un)Doing Labor,” this work proposes to see both Smart youth and young artisans as “Mastrs”—a deliberately misspelled identity that reclaims agency through irony. To be your own “Mastr” is to refuse the hierarchies of mastery and to reinvent the value of labor as collective creativity, absurd resistance, and critical play.