Upon Ma Ke’s invitation to curate his solo exhibition at Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, I took the opportunity to systematically look at a considerable amount of his works, old and new. This preparation process led me to set two goals: first, to treat this exhibition as a mid-career survey, retracing more than three decades of his artistic practice with the artist, and showing his focuses and approaches at different stages of his trajectory, the succession and evolution of different stages, and their creative impetus; second, by combing through his works, I intend to understand the kind of art historical sequence that led him to take the kind of creative paths today, and to get a grip on his choices and positions from the perspective of Chinese contemporary art history.
From our conversations, I realized that Ma Ke is an artist who paints with a sense of questions. These issues have been haunting him, troubling him, guiding him, driving him, and inspiring him to make art. Among these issues, there is the general anxiety about the cultural and artistic comparison between the East and the West, one that has long hovered over the Chinese contemporary art world. There are also many practical issues he has encountered and confronted in his artistic practice, such as issues on form and content. In Ma Ke's view, those styles or forms that have interested him or made him envious are the ladders he wants to climb, yet they are not his ultimate goal. He denies the importance of form and content while taking these two components at heart. These perceptions of art have compelled him to want to invent and discover a language of his own. After all, he believes that "art, the art of painting ultimately requires the artist to contribute a language, and one’s achievement essentially revolves around formalistic breakthrough.”
Born in the 1970s, Ma Ke has grown up, and received education during the period of economic reforms and opening up of China, followed by accelerated globalization. Since he entered into the art world in the 1990s, Ma Ke has been building his work on the proposition of formalistic innovation in modernist art. To some extent, the artist’s impetus is intimately tied to the many waves that the Chinese art world has experienced since the 1970s, and the artistic issues explored at various times. Early in his childhood, Ma Ke's grandfather and father's art inspired him. His grandfather had an interest in painting advertisements. Furthermore, his father also painted oil paintings, portraits of Chairman Mao, and the iconic pictures of pines and cranes in his childhood. Ma Ke had access to the hand-bound Manuel of the Mustard Seed Garden and art magazines at home. He was brought up in such a surrounding and by the age of seven or eight, he had developed a strong interest in drawing, mainly copying comic strips and children’s storybooks. While his peers played outside, he was at home making drawings and sketches. His sources were reference books of Western paintings his father bought in Shanghai in the 1950s, such as Laocoön, How to Draw a Portrait, and How to Make a Charcoal Drawing. Although the Cultural Revolution was nearing the end by the late 1970s, his immersion in painting and drawing was clearly at odds with his impoverished life reality. Yet, he’d gained a space for imagination. "I want to paint" became the first ambition in Ma Ke's life, one that he has been holding on to until this day. He is determined to paint his pictures well.
In 1990, Ma Ke enrolled at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts after leaving his hometown of Zibo, Shandong Province, to obtain training in realistic painting. After graduation, however, he emerged as a painter with a primarily expressive bent and gradually developed his artistic path from there. In China, the methods and principles of socialist realism have gradually become the dominant framework for left-wing artists and writers since the late 1930s. After founding the People's Republic of China, the new regime continued to strengthen the overall guidance and regulation of works in art and literature, reinforcing the uniqueness and exclusivity of socialist realism. From then on, one’s training in realism has been the primary consideration for entering art academies and the main content of art academy education. This system regulates the way art is practiced and constrains artistic thinking, and imposes ideological limits. Expressionism and other modernist modes of expression distinct from socialist realism were gradually excluded from this system. Artistic styles and languages were politicized and instrumentalized, serving as political propaganda for an extended period. As soon as the social sphere relaxed in the mid-to-late 1970s, artists began to adopt various modernist styles beyond the narrow socialist-realist statute, including borrowing from expressionist language. Expressive painting, with its emphasis on the artist's subjectivity, subjective perception to convey personal emotions, was one of the ways for artists to break away from the collective form after the Cultural Revolution.
Once the Cultural Revolution ended, artists generally wished to break free from the creative model stipulated by the socialist realist program, distinguishing oneself from it and bidding farewell. This universal desire propelled a compelling impetus to forego meaning and narrative content in one’s artistic practice, both in action and thoughts.
Artists of all ages were lethargic of the socialist-realist approach to literature and art, especially its mechanical "theory of representation,” its tendency of preaching given political themes, and instrumentalism. Between 1978 and 1982, artists initiated and advocated discussions of exploring diverse artistic forms, obtaining formal freedom, and diversifying subject matters in art, fostering a space for the practice and discourse of artistic freedom in the post-Cultural Revolution era. Working with such basic languages of symbolism, expressionism and abstraction became the primary options for artists to move away from propagandistic, descriptive, and narrative paintings. For some artists, expressionism meant personal creative freedom and potential to channel one's individuality.
In the mid-1980s, a generation of young students who received an education from the art academies after the Cultural Revolution began to enter the art scene gradually. At this time, they began to reflect critically on the trends of thoughts in art such as “Scar Art” and estheticism that had emerged after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In terms of practice, artists took the initiative to experiment with various modes of expression, from expressionism, surrealism, existentialism, symbolism, primitivism, classicalism to abstraction and pop art. They wanted to eliminate the distance between the viewer and the picture, so the works of art would make an immediate impact. To do so, they removed meaning, eliminated narrative content, abandoned illustrations of thought, set aside attitudes and emotional expressions, and interrupted the chain that produced meaning in their works. They firmly believed in the value of generating "new images" and in the transparency of the meaning of art itself. These practices constituted a general creative tendency that began to emerge in the early 1980s – Neo-realism.
This line of thoughts, from rejecting the idea of instrumentalizing art in the political stance preaching to eliminating the logic of meaning, ran through the Neo-realist paintings of the 1980s and evolved into different artistic propositions and practices at various periods since then. It even continues to this day. In the late 1980s, in response to the emergence of artworks illustrating theories and philosophical thoughts and the overdependence of art on theoretical interpretation, in the "New Wave Art Movement," artists who were teaching and practicing art in the academies proposed explicitly to "purify language." It meant to emphasize that artistic practice should return to its essence centered on art form and language. For a long time, art academies have regarded "formal exploration" as the anchor point for liberal art practice, which reinforced the tendency to circumvent narrative meaning in the works of art. The issue of artistic language has been debated fervently by artists and theorists at various points in history. In the subsequent dissemination and evolution, the discussion around the "purification of language" arbitrarily separated artistic language, technique, and form from content and thought, emphasizing the superiority and essential nature of the former. It over-simplified art practice on the narrow issue of form, and completely severed its connection with real life. These tendencies profoundly impacted the orientation of later art practices that pitted ideas against forms, isolated conceptions, and implemented formal practices.
During the "cultural fever" of the mid-1980s, many European and American theories on literary and artistic criticism were introduced into China. Among them, semiotics, iconography, narratology, structuralism, and postmodernism caught the attention of artists and critics. From the mid to late 1980s, there was a tendency for artists to adopt various symbols, such as Chinese characters, crosses, Arabic numerals, and others. In the mid-1980s, the Art Translation Series, a journal overseen by Fan Jingzhong, frequently translated and published articles by many Western art historians, introducing the methodology of Western art history, including Panofsky's iconography. The introduction of semiotics and iconography inspired art critics to interpret themes and content in the visual arts by situating them in their cultural, social, and historical contexts. Moreover, during this period, the removal of meaning and emphasis on form dominated the thoughts on art. We saw artists appropriating these symbols while deconstructing their implied meanings. By unpacking and alienating Chinese characters in their works, they wrote these numbers and symbols many times and repeatedly, translating them into glyphs to extract their meaning and connotation. In other words, the artists used symbols to establish the form of expression while keeping a distance from the meaning they embody. This is because they wanted to "cleanse the humanistic and cultural passion" and allow the symbols to exist only as forms, which met their notion of "rationality."
In 1994, Ma Ke graduated and launched his career as an artist. Young artists in the Chinese art world at this point were presented with many options. There were the "new generation" artists who portrayed the reality around them and the ordinary people from a humanistic perspective, emphasizing the documentary and intimate nature of their images. Some were given the title of "cynical realist," who adopted the language of pop art to represent the lives of ordinary people and their mundane lives. Others were identified with "political pop," which transformed political images and symbols by ways of making advertisements, while dismantling their commercial and political meanings. Some returned to classical techniques and expressions; some experimented on the canvas with mixed materials and media; others practiced art with a conceptual drive (including collaborative practices aimed at eliminating individuality); paintings with an expressive and suggestive tendency. These trends marked the multiple explorations that extended from the line of thought that advocated the elimination of meaning in the works of art.
At the same time, art critics had high expectations in the process of building an art market. They believed that opening up the art market was a shortcut for contemporary art to be accepted into mainstream social values. Unbeknownst to them, the marketization of art in the 1990s was an orientation that was coterminous with state ideology. It prompted depoliticization, which became dominant in artistic creation and thinking. Market ideology gradually spread across social spheres and the art world, pushing forward an art system oriented to commercial operations and logic.
One of the outcomes of leaving out the logic of meaning and building the art market was fostering a group of art market darlings. Benefiting from commercial success and fame, they transformed themselves into a type of social elite in the 1990s. Their relevance to social life mostly remained at the practical level of intervention, lacking critical thinking and intellectual concerns, or any commitment to social life. However, the art world rode on the inertia of the post-Cultural Revolution era, eagerly salvaging art from being a political tool, unconsciously rationalizing the practice of these newly born art elites, and thus setting a model for contemporary art practice and criticism. In practice, the interpretation and critique of contemporary art were depoliticized and removed from ideological representation since the 1990s. It was often grounded in semiotic and iconographic approaches, thus attributing cultural, political, and social significance to the images and symbols in these works. Such a disconnect between interpretation and artistic practice worked in reality, as it preserved the eligibility of these meaningless forms and images for imposition of meaning interpreted within the sequence and context of Western avant-garde. Thus it gave criticism and theory the power to "validate" the works. Since the 1990s, critics have taken on the indispensable role of interpreting and even defining works of art. For this reason, art criticism has achieved a "self-sufficiency" in the art world, focusing not exclusively, or primarily, on the evaluation of works, but rather seeking the integrity of theory and its “reproducibility,” in other words, that is, to "create" theory based on textual interpretations. Although the relationship between the pursuit of art practices that forsakes meaning and the critical practice of infusing them with meaning is a paradoxical one, the two are in reality working together intimately and fruitfully. In this relationship, the artist's work is open to infinite derivations, to be interpreted by critics and to have meaning superimposed on it. The artists wish to keep a distance from the symbols they use or invent and hope that their works would be deciphered without themselves elaborating on their meaning. Such a mentality has impacted many artists and theorists after that.
In 1995, Ma Ke experimented with representational paintings consisting of collages of unrelated objects, color blocks, and symbols, transforming three-dimensional collages into flat images. He retained their figurative content in this process, such as boxes, dinosaur toys, crow cutouts, and fragments of foreign language newspapers, without conveying any meaning. These canvases are mainly painted with even brushstrokes of dark gray and sepia, flat color blocks with precise edges in the foreground, overflowing brushstrokes, and overlaying color blocks and arbitrary marks. The ambiguous meaning of these tableaus neither point to any specific direction nor convey any meaning, but a stream of consciousness of images, brushstrokes, and color blocks.
Between 1996 and 1999, Ma Ke explored the language of cubism on the one hand and tried to create an obscure atmosphere on canvas on the other, using thin lines across his canvases to render a poetic expression. Since the mid-1990s, the medium of painting, to some extent, arrived at a bottleneck. On the one hand, politicized interpretations influenced by Cold War mentality led to the accelerated global circulation of "political pop" and "cynical realist" paintings with Chinese iconography, especially in Europe, North America, and Asian countries, such as Japan and Korea. These images "pervaded" the visual landscape, became an overwhelming force that naturally provoked a kind of resistance. Simultaneously, the conceptual art practices developed since the late 1980s engendered a cohesive force in China. The deepening of economic globalization in the 1990s facilitated exchanges and interactions between China and the international art world, where installations, video, conceptual photography, public sculpture, and performance were considered more contemporary media. In this mental framework, painting, on the contrary, became a marginalized medium, and the pursuit of painterliness gave way to the infusion of conceptual characteristics in painting.
With the participation of Chinese artists in the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Biennale in 1993 as a visible marker, the Chinese art world has become more frequently involved in art events and exchanges held mainly in Europe, North America, Asia, and other developed regions, often by invitation from the organizer, as a "sample" of global diversity. These international engagements have both opened up horizons for the artists but also caused them a lot of discomfort and anxiety. The artists felt that Chinese art was merely a "spring roll" in the international art world and that it was difficult for them to engage in dialogue and exchange on an equal footing. Such encounters and experiences were shared among artists and critics who are older than Ma Ke. More specifically, Ma Ke’s practice at this stage was still grasping for an anchor in terms of its formal language, in the realm of painting.
Amid the Chinese art world steered towards the "West," Ma Ke was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture to spend a year teaching in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, in 1998, assisting the Asmara University to build its art department. This experience provided Ma Ke with a unique perspective. Eritrea is located in the most northern part of East Africa and south of the Red Sea. After the Second World War, Eritrea ended its colonial history and founded the Federation of Ethiopia and Eritrea, which was annexed to Ethiopia in 1962 and did not gain its sovereign independence until 1995. The border war between these two states from 1998 to 2000 dealt a heavy blow to a country whose economy was mainly subsidized by agriculture. The art department that Ma Ke helped to create was located in a military camp, and the classes were open to teenagers from fifteen years old to adults aged over fifty. In addition to Ma Ke and two other Chinese teachers, one who taught printmaking and one sculpture, there were local art teachers who had returned from their studies in Italy and England.
While there, Ma Ke realized continental Africa was a vibrant but brutal place. He had firsthand experience of the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, witnessing bombs being dropped from planes. These scenes and those from the Eritrean streets later made their way into a series of drawings. Eritrea is part of the highlands, with low latitudes and cool temperatures. In Ma Ke's view, its most compelling characteristics were the people moving in and out of the streets. They looked like stage characters under a spotlight, with a strong sense of light especially suitable for painting. Ma Ke made a lot of drawings there, and upon his return, he painted a series of works with an expressive language of everyday Eritrean street scenes. In these works, the people do not occupy the central position, nor do they have distinct figurative characteristics, but are constellated in the picture like signs.
The Chinese art world underwent a process of full-scale marketization and globalization in the 1990s, which revealed considerable prospects for development and heightened artists' anxiety of self-definition. In 1996, the artist Yuan Yunsheng returned to the Central Academy of Fine Arts from the United States to teach at the Fourth Studio of the Oil Painting Department of the academy. The Fourth Studio was set up in 1985, a product of the reform and opening up and intellectual emancipation. Those who founded the Fourth Studio were of an older generation of artists, who were the teachers and contemporaries of Yuan, including Lin Gang, Xu Xingzhi, Wen Lipeng, and Pang Tao. They underwent the clampdown on creativity during the Cultural Revolution and then ushered in their artistic explorations after the Cultural Revolution. From 1978 to 1979, Yuan Yunsheng participated in a collaborative mural at the Beijing Airport, and his Hymn of Life - Joyful Water Festival features three nude Dai women bathing. In the new era, the depiction of young girls from ethnic minorities were a common subject for artists to convey notions of truth, kindness and beauty in their artworks. Yet, the naked bodies in the work became controversial first in the art circle and then escalated into a political issue. As a result, the mural had to be covered up and only revealed to the public again in the 1990s. Soon after this incident, in 1982, Yuan was invited to visit the United States. From then on, he began his fourteen-year overseas stay.
Upon his return to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1996, Yuan Yunsheng eagerly devoted himself to researching and studying what he considered as national traditions and forms, a passion he had acquired as early as the 1950s while studying with the artist Dong Xiwen. This body of painting methodology then became the primary pedagogy for the Fourth Studio. During his studies at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, Ma Ke was unsatisfied with his realist training while lacking direct access to the Western art scene.
He entered the Fourth Studio, with his confusion and questions from his earlier studies. He dedicated five years to his study at the Fourth Studio in the department. During this period, Ma Ke visited numerous museums and archaeological sites and had first-hand experience with many Chinese antiques and ancient artworks, expanding and deepening his understanding of traditional culture and art. Afterwards, his practice began to introduce elements from traditional painting and subject matters. For example, he repeatedly represented the allusion of "riding a horse into the void" in several compositions or appropriating the imagery and method of painting pine trees from traditional Chinese paintings on many tableaus.
However, during this period, Ma Ke did not immediately translate what he had learned into the content or expressions of his art. Unlike the academic artists of the 1990s, who abandoned the representational in their imageries for figurations that reproduced actual scenes, episodes of urban life, and various characters in the process of urbanization, he wanted to explore emblematic imageries, such as bones, crows, horses, tree trunks, triangles and human bodies in outlined in abbreviated and exaggerated forms, to establish recognizable pictorial quality. Among these works, there were both grandiose scenes and oneiric fantasies. These imageries contain the symbolic potential and mood without making specific implications, nor do they provide any ideological associations. His focus was not on narrating or conveying an idea, but simply on providing complex juxtapositions of imageries, real and imaginary, rendering illogical and illusory dimensions on canvas, and ending it there, so that any attempt to analyze the meaning behind these images would be futile. To a certain extent, this is also a representational approach that’s devoid of meaning. He often paints with a thin layer of color, with a subdued palette, occasionally putting discordant, even conflicting, colors together that are compelling to the viewer.
China's art market further developed after 2000, providing artists with more opportunities to survive outside the official art system of academies and institutions. Shortly after graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Ma Ke became an independent artist who painted surreal imageries with an expressionistic approach. Moreover, with an expanded space for artistic exploration, he had the opportunity to paint works in larger dimensions, and the number of works also increased dramatically. Dream Scene (2002), the two works share a similar composition; both feature a giant horse lying on its back and a man and a woman with undiscernible faces. Although their scenarios vary somewhat, one appears to be traveling in the mountains while the other has an indistinct context, but with two speech bubbles of their respective words. Even with such symbolic imagery, it is still impossible for the artist to point out the subject in the paintings for us. In the painting entitled Balloons (2002), the figure lying on the side in the foreground replaces the horse lying on its back in Dreamscape, and the four heads above the body enhance the eeriness of the painting, but compositionally, it is not difficult to see the coherence of these three paintings. In paintings such as Pull Her Hair (2003) and Back of a Woman (2002), Ma Ke attempted to represent the human body in abbreviated forms, exaggerating some parts and transforming the body into icons and symbols. These paintings, having set aside the burden of meaning but endowed with symbolic potentials, are more appealing, especially when people were generally tired of the monolithic and ideological interpretation of Chinese art between the 1990s and 2008. They at least provided more space for imagination and projection.
Ma Ke has always depicted the same imagery repeatedly, exploring the possibility of distortion and variation through repetition. The painting Dream Scene (2003) seems to be a "sequel" to its earlier version made in 2002, in which the picture turns from horizontal to vertical, with the majority of the surface covered in white. Only a part of the horse remains, yet its connection in composition with the two previous works is noticeable. Likewise, the 2005 work Heroic "retells" the story of a horse on all fours with its head thrown up in the air, while the man in the lower right corner also looks up at the sky, a sword pierce at his feet as if marking the end of a vicious battle. Reading (2003) and Trapped (2003) can also be considered as another set of "twins." A horse sits on the ground with its head up thrown out on the left side, and on the right, a man is reading. This man can be seen as either the artist himself or anyone else, but he is a pictorial sign at best. Using these symbols repeatedly on canvas, Ma Ke built up a pictorial logic that would string together his various works.
In addition to the recurring imageries, in this process, we see the artist’s expansive endeavors with the canvas, both in honing painterliness and broadening the complexity and scope of his imagery. As he grew older, a sense of history drawn from personal experience emerged on his canvases. Since 2005, Ma Ke has completed large-dimensional works such as Tough It Out Series, Crossing the Water, Suburb, A Landscape of One's Own, Age of Hero, Calling a Stagg a Horse, Marking the Boat to Retrieve the Sword, Construction Sites, The Snake’s Shadow, In the Wild, etc. These are all attempts to juxtapose multiple images in one picture, while these works continue to reject the logic of engendering meaning but seem to tell a story and can be connected to real life. He often adopted the titles of fables and four-letter Chinese idioms to name his artworks, hoping to forge philosophical expressions that would recall a specific story or truth. In these narration-inclined works, the figures are generally prominent, looking up at the sky or down at the viewer to suggest a kind of oppression. After 2008, Ma Ke felt the atrophy of everyday life and social spaces due to increased regulation. He introduced the images of the police and stars into several of his paintings. Although he never explicitly stated his intent, these attempts document his perception of reality.
In the Post-Beijing Olympics era, the Chinese art world became increasingly in sync with the global art discourse. At the same time, many art practices appeared absent of criticality or a sense of history. Most of the artworks and art exhibitions seemed to be in a state of void. They either infinitely amplified the artist's current daily experience, personal details, and moods or elaborated on life and Zen in vain. They jumped from concept to concept and elevated escape to "resistance." Some of them even directly equated the value of art with retail prices and social influence, synonymous with the social reality of Chinese society. After 2010, Ma Ke painted many works of a man walking on a wire rope or curled up in a cave, a kind of self-portrait conveying his own position or anticipation and poetically transforming his concern for the reality.
Over the past few years, Ma Ke has slowly reduced his attempts to establish logical relationships accessible for interpretation in his paintings. Instead, he has begun using geometric forms such as dots, lines, surfaces, spheres, and cones to compose single flat images such as rabbits, lions, and human bodies, in single colors. Either pink or gray has become the undertone of his new series. They are even less possible for us to extract symbolic meaning from these paintings. In addition, he has brought back his previously recurring shapes and symbols into the pictures, color, shape, line, and brushstroke. These critical components of modernist paintings have become critical rhetoric of Ma Ke’s self-expression. Since the 1990s, he has constantly appropriated Picasso and Cubism to break free from the path of realistic painting and naturalistic style. To this end, he has "painted and edited" his paintings in a way that he refers to as "horizontal wandering." When painting, Ma Ke deconstructs the image through brush strokes, which constantly shape the image. Then he restarts again, heightening the sense of alienation and distance between the work and the subject. He repeatedly scrapes the paint and smears the canvas to make its color and texture fuller, providing a solid visual impact. He realizes that "painting” should be a verb, and the painter should be actively involved. Therefore, he paints to establish the ontology, space, order, and logic of the tableau. In his view, that is an indispensable path to produce the language of painting, which marks the completion of a work on canvas.
The human figure is a sign undergoing constant transformation in Ma Ke’s paintings. The characters that appear in his early paintings are now placed in a specific context and storyline, and the figures are more concrete, with some of the recurring characters being the artist himself. The scenes in these paintings are legible and recognizable, giving viewers a certain sense of familiarity, for instance, an indoor gathering. The artist has gradually reduced figures to silhouettes or shadows, placing them in space-time between the real and the virtual, the present and the traditional. For this reason, their contexts became more symbolic, such as a recurring cave or a person walking on a thin line across the canvas. In recent years the human figure has been transformed entirely into abstract bodies. Ma Ke views the human body through the lens of a martial artist, breaking it down into parts. He also believes that the compartmentalized approach of modern life, emphasizing the division of labor, has instrumentalized and alienated people, making them incomplete. In his recent series of paintings of the human body, he has put the parts of the human body back together like wooden building blocks and adopted cubic language to assemble them subjectively.
The compositions, images, motifs, and even work titles repeatedly appropriated by Ma Ke can be conceived, to some extent, as a continuation of Chinese artists' practice of appropriating symbols after 1987, under the influence of Pop art, semiotics, and postmodernism. Yu Youhan's "circle," Ding Yi's "cross," Wang Guangyi’s grid, Fu Zhongwang’s mortise, and tenon, and Zhang Xiaogang’s “x” etc. – these signs enter the artist's creation in the form of images and do not embody any meaning or emotion. We can almost claim that they are what we perceive! Any reading or interpretation would deviate from its original intent and even be unnecessary. Susan Sontag's masterpiece Against Interpretation became popular in the Chinese art world after the 1990s. It ultimately tells of the artist's desire for people to genuinely pay attention to their practices (both form and content), rather than attributing meaning beyond what it is. As discussed earlier, however, semiotics and iconography have led art criticism down the path of articulating the work, providing meaning, and deciphering the artist's intentions for the viewer. In this interpretive framework, artists and theorists also believe that incessant elaborations would make the meaning behind signs and images self-evident. One should be able to tacitly empathize or project personal understanding onto artworks as long as the artist simply adopting and restating certain signs or images.
Neither does Ma Ke think that painting can be entirely dependent on concepts. To some extent, painting occupies a place where reason and concepts cannot reach. While some of his work titles project narrative attempts or imply certain connotations, for instance, All That is Solid Melts into Air, The Rider Who Roams the Sky, etc., he always reminds us to look at the painting, look at it again and again, while trying to break free from the confines of meaning. One should look at the imagery, look at each color, look at each line, look at each brushstroke. Inspect the picture to discover whether there is an apparent relationship between these components or disguised under a hidden and complex relationship. Furthermore, it is the painter and his artistic vision that create such a relationship. In Ma Ke’s words, "The process of each painting is synonymous to a story of Zhang Daoling becoming immortal." Each painting takes shape through the artist deconstructing the image through his brushstrokes, constantly shaping and overturning it. In this process, he treats construction, organization, reflection, and experimentation as the basis of his work, instead of creation or innovation. Over the years, he has gradually developed a style that integrates realism, abstraction, and narration and "conceals" his artistic concerns, perception of art, and understanding of the world in his paintings.
When he was a child, Ma Ke read The Story of Afanti. Whenever he encountered a new word he did not know, he would read it as "hole." Like the symbol X in mathematics, which symbolizes an unknown number and is directly involved in arithmetic. The word "hole" was part of the production of meaning through text in Ma Ke's reading experience. The use of the symbol to temporarily transcend the limits of his personal experience gave him a sense of freedom, and through the "hole," he was able to build his understanding of the object. As an adult, Ma Ke also brought the option of using "temporary substitutes" into his work. He returned to the same subject, image, or composition in many paintings and applied them as a medium and a code for what he wanted to explore in his paintings: the grammar and rhetoric of painting.
In mathematics, X can also symbolize all numbers; similarly, in Ma Ke's "vocabulary," "hole" can be used to refer to any word that is foreign or unknown to him. On his paintings, the same figures, images, and forms may be considered as a substitute or a sign to explore the language of painting and open up the many possibilities on canvas. Among the many subjects that Ma Ke deliberates on, how to make paintings independent of their content and the production meaning is the question he tries to solve in his work. When we look at Ma Ke's oeuvre, we also realize that each painting and subject matter is only a temporary substitute for his actual intention. We can even claim that each work is only an "interface" and a "code" that Ma Ke "borrowed" to solve his artistic problems.
This mid-career retrospective that takes "The Hole" as its title, intends to present the subject matters artist Ma Ke addresses, the way he works, and his position on these issues. The exhibition does not take the chronological approach, but rather the "codes" he adopted into his paintings as a thread. I have categorized and reorganized Ma Ke's works since 1995, grouping them in eight rooms according to the images and compositions of his works. Each room showcases one type of (or similar) composition/image, spanning different periods that address various concerns of artistic language. In each room, we would see a particular motif or figure of the artist’s ongoing work: a still life of fruits that he has depicted repeatedly over the last three or four years, a horse that he saw in a comic strip as a child, an image of a celestial god trampling on a ghost underfoot that appears in Buddhist art, and a fragmented human body, among others. By temporarily setting aside the transmission of meaning in his works, we focus on the echoes and modulations of the same motif and the artist's multifaceted experiments on the "grammar" and "rhetoric" of painting. These repetitions enforce our impressions and perceptions of his work's forms, colors, lines, and brushstrokes by simulating this "tautological repetition" of his work in the exhibition and juxtaposing his works of the same content and iconography painted at different times. This approach is more relevant to the artist's working style than a linear presentation of his career.
Through this case study of Ma Ke’s art practice, we have realized that artists who matured in the 1990s and 2000s launched their careers with an intellectual impetus that suspends political concerns and representation of meaning. For this reason, their development was often constrained by a perceptual framework that has been in place since the establishment of the socialist-realist system that considers artworks a medium for conveying meaning and expressing specific central ideas. Within this framework, people refused to recognize the artist's rejection of meanings in their art, and constantly sought to attach more "interpretation" to their works. In order to undo such fetishization of meaning, the artists sometimes fall into the trap of moving from one form to another and becoming overly vigilant in suspending their intentions and power of meaningful expression. How to continuously exploring the artistry of painting while establishing a diverse and meaningful connection between individual practice and the art world and the real world to which one belongs, beyond literal reflections, is an essential issue confronting all artists of the new era.
