Jennifer Wen Ma ( 1973, Beijing, China) is a visual artist working and living in New York and Beijing. Ma's interdisciplinary practice bridges varied media such as installation, drawing, video, public art, design, performance, and theatre.
Early life
Ma was born in Beijing China, in 1973. After moving from Beijing to Oklahoma, Ma started drawing and painting as an alternative to literature, from which she felt alienated having to speak a second language. Ma received a Bachelor of Arts degree in advertising design from Oklahoma Christian University of Science and Arts. In 1999, she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Pratt Institute in New York.
Career Post graduation, she worked for eight years as the studio director for artist Cai Guo-Qiang.
Early works
Ma's initial practical training in advertising fostered in her "a production and design aesthetic … in the sense that she is responsive to the qualities and needs of materials as well as to the demands of place and public," while remaining critical of market and client. In 2001, Ma fought with another female Asian artist/designer in the live-wrestling performance Crouching Bitch at Deitch Projects. The combat signified the competition between Ma's own short-lived Dodorama fashion label and her co-combatant's, mocking the concurrent New York Fashion Week where downtown designers rivaled to be the "best."
The iconoclastic dimension of Crouching Bitch continued in installations such as Wash Hands, made in Beijing in 2003, and Project Change World: City of Yan'an in 2006, but within a more social and political context. In Wash Hands, formally conforming to the government-led hygiene campaign against SARS, Ma instigated unease by asking viewers to wash hands in the same bowl of water. Seemingly in honor of the once politically significant city Yan'an, Project Change World: City of Yan'an was a public service program to highlight, poke fun, and instigate into the universally mocked Chinglish.
Ma continued to deal with social consciousness and psychology. In Self-Comfort, a 2005 installation, a video of a woman masturbating was projected onto an actual bed, presenting a self-guided release from loneliness and tension in daily life. The conventionally ignoble act obtained an ambiguous meaning by reflecting the universal loneliness in society.
Subsequent works stay highly aware of people's ways of living, with more focus on the spiritual life. The video installation Alms was part of the Singapore Biennale in 2006. The video trilogy was set in three religious sites of distinct beliefs. It featured a hand clasping, revealing and finally losing glass balls. The sound track was composed out of recordings of vocal and instrumental sounds of worship at each site. The project underscored the Biennial's theme of "Belief" by drawing connections between sites of three distinctive religions, namely Judaism, Islam and Christianity. More fundamentally, the glass balls symbolized the balance that is being constantly negotiated in spiritual life.
Alms is the continuation of Ma's reflection upon religious life since Aeolian Garden at UMOCA in 2005, a work consisting of brass windpipes installed under the medieval bridge of San Francesco in the Tuscan town of Colle di Val d'Elsa, creating an atmospheric soundscape. The bridge, initially built to lead people from daily life to religious refuge, "can once again serve as a conduit for contemplation and reflection." The work remains part of the town's cultural patrimony.
While Alms and Aeolian Garden do call for the coexistence of religions and the peace of mind, the idea of dissonance is another running theme of Ma's early works. The dissonance within social life is subtly allegorized by the use of sound. For the short video Rear Window, Ma documented the nightlife of people living in a large residential complex across the street from her apartment. The video is accompanied by sound tracks composed from the artist's own imagination, which makes the much-desired intimacy a mere projection of one's own psyche. Communication seems unachievable despite the voyeuristic observation. The dissonance continues in the soundscapes created by Aeolian Garden. Mario Cristinati observes that, "The music … may be harmonious or dissonant, depending on the particular wind conditions … It also demonstrates how nature intervenes with our senses … similar to how spiritual life and daily life collide." The soundtrack for Alms combined from sound recorded at three religious sites, is also at times cacophonous, revealing a critical attitude toward tolerance and unity.
The Beijing Olympics and Large-Scale Projects
Ma was one of the seven core creative team members, and Chief Designer for Visual and Special Effects for the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympic in Beijing, working with colleagues such as the renowned film director Zhang Yimou, choreographers Zhang Jigang and Chen Weiya, contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang, and theatre directors Fan Yue and Wang Chaoge. Ma was the youngest member of the creative team, and was thought to exemplify the younger generation of China "that's trying to reinvent how China thinks and works" by inserting creativity to the country's art and industry. She received an Emmy for the US broadcast of the ceremony.
Ma returned to work with Olympic venues in 2009, transforming the façade of Digital Beijing into a LED work entitled In-Between World—Daydream Nation. In 2013, Ma embarked on the light design for the Water Cube. The project Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube incorporates traditional Eastern philosophy and modern technology. The building's celluloid body shined in different colors, rhythms, movements, and compositions in patterns calculated daily by a computer logarithm based on daily I Ching readings, and societal conditions as reflected in social media statistics.
Ma's competence to implement large installations and projects stands out among her contemporaries. While collaborative projects like the Olympics showcased her competence for coordination, Ma's work as an individual artist also shone. The New Adventures of Havoc in Heaven commenced a few days before the Olympic opening ceremony. Taking place over Tiananmen Square, conjuring the figure of the beloved mythological figure Monkey King wielding his magic staff, this work was a direct reaction against the inequalities Ma witnessed while working for the Olympics. In this way, she borrowed the Monkey King's insubordinate spirit in the manner of a self-manifesto.
On the occasion of the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2012, Ma created another smoke-cloud installation depicting the Monkey King. The New Adventures of Havoc in Heaven III was beamed onto manufactured clouds over the Sydney Opera House. This mediation on the Monkey King was a continuation of her "vibrant, defiant" work The New Adventures of Havoc in Heaven II in London for the Mythologies exhibition.
In 2015, Ma drew upon traditional Chinese philosophy to design a grand performance for the Spartan Marching Band of the Michigan State University. The massive campus arena was "the perfect venue for bridging cultural understandings." The marriage of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" and marching band techniques was received positive feedback from both performers and audiences.
Ink-Based Works
Charta published Ma's self-titled bilingual monograph in 2013. According to the introduction by Thomas Krens, Director Emeritus of Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, her "fluency is simultaneously linguistic, experimental and historical." The mediation between Eastern and Western cultures has already manifested itself in Ma's early works and becomes more prominent with her growing interest in traditional Chinese medium and iconography.
The use of Chinese ink in Ma's works assumes complex meanings in a contemporary discourse. Her video Brain Storm juxtaposes her manipulation of fluid ink painting with an unwaveringly walking man and horse, evoking "a life's journey or a psychic one" whose "unfolding we witness with curiosity and fascination." She was seen to have rendered "a new artistic language of time-based landscape painting." From 15 October 2009–3 January 2010, The Phillips Collection displayed Brain Storm, reconfigured “…for the smaller, more intimate space of the Phillips, adding an audio component—the sound of breath blown through lips—that reinforces the atmospheric quality of the piece.”
Ink was also used to address issues such as time and life. Ma's solo exhibition Inked with the Eslite Gallery in 2011 applied ink to live plants from which green leaves kept bursting out, displaying the resilience of life.
The strength of life has been explored multiple times with variance. Ma offered a more complex interpretation of such a practice on the occasion of her 2014 work Black Beauty—A Living Totem. During an interview, she indicated that chance element was taken more into consideration. The "uneven process of regeneration and degeneration" of plants under "the duress of pollutants and the disruption" "[offered] a commentary on the way we live today [revealing] the individual decisions that are made under the stress of everyday life."
In Alpha Lillstrom Portrait Garden, commissioned in 2014 for Nonument Park as a part of Washington, D.C.'s 5x5 public art festival, this artistic practice gained a more public dimension. Art's relationship with the public was explored further in A Winter Landscape Cradling Bits of Sparkle, created in 2015 as part of the Market Square Public Art Program in Pittsburg. Inked plants installed in winter evolved with green leaves and bright flowers as spring approached, transforming the otherwise blackened forest, encouraging citizens to feel and embrace seasons.
Ink "can also be a means to examine the recurrent presence of memories," as viewers walked between inked mounds of sand in her work Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, 2011, exploring a personal landscape dotted with artifacts from the artist's life. Inked Friendship, carrying on the discussion about time, memory and life, was created in memory of a deceased friend.
Public Art
Ma's wildly eclectic oeuvre can be connected by the general theme of interactivity as embodied by public participation in her work. Awareness of the public was already present in her earlier works, which grappled with concrete social issues ranging from English signs in China to religion. Large-scale projects such as the design for the 2008 Olympics also served as the catalyst for Ma's engagement with public art. In previous works, she has kept the delicate balance between involving the public and guarding personal artistic visions. For the 2013 project Isle of Enchantment, Ma built an island in a lake in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, using live plants painted in Chinese ink. The island appeared like a classical Chinese garden from a distance, but was composed of plants native to Brazil. This work involved collaborating with local people over several months, and witnessed Ma's own developing interest in paradise as an artistic subject.
Bending the Arc was a site-specific, ephemeral work commissioned for Atlanta's 2015 Flux Night to explore the legacies of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. As in previous public projects, Ma carefully investigated the site and the context of the project. Inspired by King's contention that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," Ma projected a line of light on a wall in King's former neighborhood. The line would vibrate, bounce, ricochet, or bend into an arch when audience participants whisper, speak, sing, or shout into the microphones that dotted the field, visualizing the collective force of human voice and breath.