Ma Qiusha
Ma Qiusha’s work is often explicitly biographical and hyper-specific in its context. Her diversified art practice encompasses video, photography, painting and installation. Linking interestingly and cautiously with the conflicts and dilemmas that are encountered in daily experience, her works reveal strange imagination concealed beneath the surface of the mundane. These subtle experiences of daily life conveyed by the body, or by parts of the body, arise repeatedly in several of her works, mostly expressed as metaphorical postures of a more ambiguous nature. Another overarching theme in Ma Qiusha’s works is the intergenerational gaps, as she often demonstrates particular flair for injecting her art with subtle but unmistakable signs and symbols of the sociocultural transformations during the several recent high-speed decades that are deeply complex in their mining of personal and collective memories, offering audiences insights into lived, human experiences. In one sense, all of her work is imagistic, the often-used “window” employed as a rhetorical vehicle in various scenes to present the various perspectives for viewing conceived by the artist. Bringing together relationships, objects, structures and stories as a way to subvert dominant readings of their histories, her works stand out as increasingly crucial documents of the country’s tensions and its political and social shifts.
Ma Qiusha received her BA from Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing and MFA from Alfred University, New York. She currently lives and works in Beijing. Her solo exhibitions were held at OCT Art Terminal Xi’an; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester; Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing; and Taikang Space, Beijing. Her works have been shown at institutions including Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago University; Para/Site, Hong Kong; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the ZKM, Karlsruhe; Orange County Museum of Art, California; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York; Groninger Museum, the Netherlands; Tate Modern, London and more.
She was nominated for Porsche “Young Chinese Artists” (2019), the Pierre Huber Prize (2014) and “Young Artist of the Year” by Award of Art China (AAC) in 2017 and 2013.