Brand Identity
Digital Design
3D Design
Art Direction
Illustration
XR/Game
Creative Coding
Amazon, Visa, Pfizer, Under Armour, Walmart, Tencent, Match Group, Modern Sky, Independent, Childrens Hospital Association
Press Play, Brooklyn Art Book Fair, MAGFest, Game Developer Conference, Shake That Button, Quantum Art, Stories in Motion, Auto-Organics: Robots for a Living Earth, MIT Reality Hack, IBM Quantum Jam, NEWVIEW Awards, Code Craft, Processing Community Day Taiwan.
Team Design, The Working Assembly, Wix, Digitas, Harvard FAS CAMLab, SenseTime, Parsons School of Design, University of the Arts London, Tsinghua University
Shāmǎtè (杀马特) is a subculture that emerged in early-2000s China among rural and working-class youth, known for its exaggerated styling and high-saturation visuals. Often dismissed in mainstream discourse as “tasteless,” its visual language can be understood as a response to identity anxiety and social marginalization, asserting visibility through extreme self-expression. Learn more about shāmǎtè here.
Misreading
This book uses “illegibility” as a design strategy, combining Martian script (火星文) and non-grid layouts to disrupt conventional reading. The text becomes difficult to read, turning “not understanding” into an experience. Through visual noise and overload, the work challenges ideas of clarity in design and reflects how this subculture has long been misread or erased.
© 2026 Yixuan Liu all rights reserved.