Ma Liuming

framed



Executed in 2004.

Denmark, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Made in China: Works from the Estella Collection, March - August 2007, fig. 49
Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, Made in China: Contemporary Chinese Art at the Israel Museum, September 2007 - March 2008

Generally in good condition.
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One of the most fascinating performance artists of his generation, Ma Liuming first became known for his presentations in Beijing's rundown East Village (named after the New York City neighborhood) in the mid-1990's. His public displays in the guise of a female—assuming the alternate name Fen-Ma Liuming—were riveting in their provocative transgressions of gender and privacy. Once transformed with makeup and dress, Ma became an extremely attractive woman, although his naked performances undermined the gorgeous face of his female persona by displaying a skinny male body. Similar to other artists his age in Beijing, though more literally, Ma embodied a rebelliousness that acted in concert with both an actual and symbolic awareness of the symbols of Chinese culture. This could be seen, for example, in Ma's walk as Fen-Ma on the Great Wall, a performance that was terminated only when his feet began to bleed. Or another naked performance, entitled Lunch, in which Ma boiled a meal of potatoes, scraps of paper, and a watch in a pot and then buried the results. Like the early actions of his friend and colleague Zhang Huan, Ma's performances were rightly perceived as instances of cultural defiance, cryptic though they were, and eventually the police took action against the village:  Ma Liuming was imprisoned along with fellow artist Zhu Ming. Such events spurred many artists to pursue careers internationally, which fed into their widening recognition; the destruction of the village, though frightening at the time, only added momentum to the careers of these artists who would soon become globally known.

 

Ma would go on to undertake performances world wide, in which he would sit naked in front of an audience, sometimes sleeping or feigning sleep; individual audience members would sit beside him and have their picture taken with the naked artist. The behavior of audience members ranged from the overtly sexual to the symbolic, while the artist himself posed passively, usually inertly, allowing the audience to respond as they would to his vulnerability. Interestingly, a number of audience members removed their own clothes for their portrait with the artist. Ma has created other inventive situations that play off his unusual persona; in addition to his performance photography, he created the work Fen-Ma Liuming in London (Lot 1140), for example, in which he fell asleep while sitting on a chair resting at an angle to the wall supporting it. This performance is documented in the large-scale symmetrical triptych offered.

 

Ma's art was long supported by both the audacity of the naked gender-bending performance and the open vulnerability attending it. While he no longer does performances, his past actions are important works from an unusual time in China - a time when artists were stretching, and in the local context positively breaking, the boundaries of acceptable art and behavior. Indeed, his actions are central to the cultural legacy of the 1990's, when almost everything was up for grabs.

 

While best known for his performance work, Ma originally studied painting at the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts between 1987 and 1991. Relatively soon after his graduation, in 1993, he began a challenging series of paintings in which he painted his own face, often in female guise, attached to the body of a baby. (This image would subsequently have more than symbolic weight when Ma became the father of a boy in the fall of 2004.) In 1996 Ma mounted a solo exhibition of paintings at the Chinese Contemporary Gallery in London, his first international exhibition, and the sale of the works gave him money for the first time in his life. Ma intended to create psychic discomfort in these painted grafts of an adult head onto an infant body, and he succeeds in unsettling his audience. The contrast between maturity and infancy sharply connotes a troubling space in which neither is fully experienced or achieved.

 

Baby No. 15B (Lot 1137) and Baby No. 2 (Lot 1138) are later derivations of this body of work. 15B consists of a self-portrait of the now older artist attached to a baby's body, but here Ma has painted a very narrow, elongated image of himself riding a hobby horse, as if seen in a concave mirror (an 'anamorphic,' in technical parlance). The combination of disjunctive parts and an unusual treatment of the image overall, in which the narrow proportions of the figure hover in the center of a vast black background, intensify the eccentricity of the painting. Ostensibly an idiosyncratic study of the self, the portrait further distorts the already unnatural fusion of Ma's mature head with an infant's body. Ma's countenance is serious without being grim, as though he is perhaps contemplating the unusual presentation of his own body, which seems at once coherent and deliberately misguided. As self-portrait, the painting presents a visual conundrum.  And yet No. 2, though more realistic in appearance is no less strange, is the Ma-baby hybrid with long raven hair and full red lips playing with snow balls in a cloudscape? Or is the work a sophisticated demonstration of Ma's modeling and shading skills, in which the 'sky' merges 'balls' as seamlessly as Ma's head is fused with the crouching baby body?   

 

Along with his painted portraits, Ma has created a small body of sculptural work treating similar themes. Baby (Lot 1139), cast in fiberglass, brings Ma's uncanny subject matter into three-dimensional space. Again, the adult head is joined with an infant's body, and this hybrid figure is cradled in the palms of two large hands. The idea of protection is central to the sculpture, but the absence of reasonable proportions, even at first glance, subverts a simple, saccharine reading of the work. If we think of Ma's art as rebellious, his insubordination crafts travesties of the metaphysical as well as the physical. Baby shows Ma sleeping peacefully in the hands of some giant protective figure. It is a primal image, the power of which derives from the sharp realism of the forms, despite the fact that, when viewed as component parts, none of the varied human proportions match. Here as elsewhere Ma's skills are both technical and psychological; he transgresses boundaries in order to show they exist. In the context of contemporary Chinese culture, this was and remains a landmark achievement.