Ma Qiusha is a Beijing-based female artist whose practice emerged in the years following the turn of the millennium. Through the intensity of personal experience, she gives form to the defining conditions of an era marked by constant transformation.
The world is renewing itself at an accelerating pace, yet these transformations no longer carry a shared vision of the future. Although each new development exceeds the limits of individual imagination, such transformations have themselves become ordinary, becoming a force that suppresses the individual’s capacity to imagine. They arrive as the jagged realities produced by an arrhythmic speed, striking each person and demanding immediate adjustment in order to accommodate new conditions of life. Across Ma Qiusha’s practice, which spans different media and technologies across generations, she turns instinctively inward, taking the body and kinship as her points of connection, transforming these new realities and unfamiliar things, so difficult for the body to assimilate, into a form of belief and a palpable warmth. Her practice remains rooted in her partner, friends, family, and home. These bonds of kinship and affinity surround the individual, cushioning the uncertainties that descend upon everyday life. Yet this seemingly stable buffer encircling the self is itself continually subjected to disruption, doubt, and transformation.
In this exhibition, Ma Qiusha works through cyanotype, photography, 3D printing, and other image-making processes to repeatedly reconfigure the prototypes in the characters of China’s Model Opera from her mother’s generation together with the deity figures created by her daughter. Through these acts of image production, the two women gradually shift from being Ma Qiusha’s mother and daughter to becoming producers of meaning for these figures—a shared, public authorship. The more pronounced the differences between the attributes and characteristics of these images become, the more independent the positions occupied by the mother and the daughter appear. The concrete oppositions and connections surrounding the individual are transformed into formal differences and affinities within an abstract space-time. Past and future emerge unpredictably, while the present can no longer locate a stable point of continuity between them. What the present is remains unresolved, sensed only as the cursor moves across its surface.
The present has lost its capacity to unify the past and the future within space and time, and no longer possesses a determinate form. It circulates through different forms, continually expanding and proliferating in order to secure a place for itself, and in doing so, produces reality itself. Reality is an outcome of the productive capacities of technology and media. The greater these capacities become, the more immediate reality appears. Yet where what is produced properly belongs—whether distant or near—remains indeterminate. The individual no longer possesses a direct sense of proximity or distance; distance and relationality persist only as concepts. While producing an increasingly immediate reality, the individual simultaneously receives the world from without. Personal experience becomes a by-product of one’s own production, yet without these by-products, one is left without orientation.
This act of searching with a cursor through a field of ultrasonic imagery marks the artist’s position within a state of perpetual transformation. It is Ma Qiusha’s position: a point of articulation between the past and the future. It also contains the individual’s judgement of, and appropriation of, the public. There is no originality, only response.
