Contemporary Visual Culture MA QIUSHA, ANITA DUBE, DALE HARDING, IZUMI KATO, GWANGJU BIENNALE ISSUE 111 NOV/DEC 2018 C U T T I N G T H R O U G H H I S T O R I E S By Tom Mouna Ma Qiusha 78 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111 (Previous spread) FROM NO. 4 PINGYUANLI TO NO. 4 TIANQIAOBEILI , 2007, single-channel video with color and sound: 7 min 54 sec. All images courtesy the artist and Beijing Commune. (This page) FOG NO. 6 , 2012, watercolor on paper, 98.5 x 152 cm. (Opposite page) STORY OF SPACE – MY GRANDMA’S LIVING ROOM NO. 1 , 2007–08, digital print from the series “Story of Space,” 86.5 x 118 cm. Features artasiapacific.com 79 Beijing traffic flows around six concentric ring roads. Demarcating the megacity and carrying its infamous traffic, these quadrilateral highways are in many ways markers of growth. Much like the layers of a tree trunk, Beijing’s rings have expanded with age as the city’s population has surged, and the need for living space has increased. Although Ma Quisha works out of a studio situated just inside the sixth ring road, her early childhood was spent in the city’s core. Born in 1982, Ma lived with her mother, father and great- grandmother in Shijing hutong , located a kilometer and a half south of Tiananmen Square, for the first three years of her life. These narrow alleyways, framed by clusters of courtyards found within the second ring road and laid out within the ruins of a demolished Ming-dynasty city wall, were traditionally occupied by single extended families dating back to the Yuan dynasty. With the arrival of socialism in the mid-20th century, many were divided up and are now mostly inhabited by dozens of intergenerational families, giving these complexes their compacted, swirling energy. Academics and critics of Chinese modern and contemporary art often emphasize the massive impact of generational differences on artists’ output, categorizing those who were born before 1980, during the 1980s, and after 1990. Distinguishing the various generations can seem logical, particularly because of the seismic social, political and cultural shifts that have taken place in post-1949 China, which are often reflected in artists’ works—beginning with the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and continuing with the period of “reform and opening-up” starting from 1978; the more than tenfold increase in asset valuation since the late-1990s; the official beginning and end of the one-child policy (1979–2015); and the contentious 2008 Beijing Olympics, which catalyzed a massive urban renewal of the capital and attempted to usher in a new era of soft power. Ma does not shy away from highlighting these sociocultural transformations in her installations and videos that are understated yet deeply complex in their mining of personal and collective memories, offering audiences insights into lived, human experiences. Revolving around her and her family’s experiences as well as wider networks of collective cultural memories and experiences, her practice demonstrates an acute awareness of intergenerational differences. Much of Ma’s work focuses on her hometown. The watercolor-on- paper series “Fog” (2012) draws on Ma’s repository of early memories of living in Shijing hutong . One of the works from the series, Fog No. 6 (2012), appears to be a minimalist painting of a dark-blue background, with a single thread of white paint worming through the darkness. On closer inspection, one can see a textured, floral pattern in the dark backdrop, the result of Ma affixing a thin gauze over the surface and painting over the fabrics with watercolor. For this project, Ma had returned to the area around her childhood hutong , and asked residents to swap their old net curtains—which she planned to use for the series—with new ones. This type of curtain, Ma explained to me, is essential to hutong life. With space so tight and lives overlapping, the thin material provides privacy while allowing light through. It is this semi-opaqueness that Ma wants to highlight in Fog No. 6 , with the white line hesitantly drawn across the canvas serving as an exaggerated signifier of suffused light passing through her great-grandmother’s net curtains—one of her earliest memories. An earlier photographic series, “Story of Space” (2007–08) is a study of two places familiar to Ma: Beijing and the exurban community around Alfred, New York, where she completed an MFA program at Alfred University. For each artwork in the series, Ma photographed the interiors of spaces such as a public toilet, a laundromat and a church, with a piecemeal focus on the entirety of the spaces. She then took these individual, zoomed-in parts and stitched them into a collage, creating a flat, two-dimensional representation of the space. For the photographs she took in Beijing, one of the things that Ma wanted to highlight was the city’s flux, as it appears at both an individual and an aggregate scale. For example, in Story of Space: Shoe Shop (2007–08), Ma captured an unadorned, utilitarian shop crammed with hastily stacked piles of shoeboxes, as a metaphor for the constant and rapid changes in proprietorship seen in similar locations across the city. She explained: “I’d seen the shop, like many in Beijing at this time, switching owners and transforming its stock on an almost monthly basis.” In contrast, Story of Space – My Grandma’s Living Room No. 1 (2007–08) depicts, in close-up detail, 80 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111 a room filled with simple necessities like worn-out cooking pots, wooden furniture and family photographs, emphasizing stasis and history. Although these interiors function differently, as depicted in these carefully constructed compositions, Ma reveals that each space plays a significant role in making up the city. For Ma, Beijing’s structures contain narratives about society and its histories, which can be unpacked and examined for new resonances and associations. Ma found this was the case with the never-completed “Luxury Brand Outlet Mall and Eco-Resort,” optimistically named Wonderland, which symbolizes the rapid consumer transformation and rising middle class of the late 1980s and 1990s. These same driving factors, Ma believes, were responsible for shifts in taste and demand for women’s apparel and products. This association between the two social phenomena became the subject of Ma’s installation series “Wonderland” (2016–18), in which she explores different kinds of nylon tights, from the 1980s to the present day, while evoking the period’s unpredictable economic fluctuations. For her solo show at Beijing Commune in 2016, Ma took a ten-by-six-meter slab of concrete, smashed it into chunks, and then wrapped these shards in sheer, nude tights of varying shades, before piecing the concrete back into its original rectangular shape. As Ma explained to me, “Shattering and reassembling the concrete reflects those same powerful forces that both brought to life and halted the ‘Wonderland’ project, signaling unfulfilled dreams and the fractures that occurred in society as a result of rapid change at this time.” The series had also been prompted by the birth of Ma’s first child, an event that led her to study her own mother’s generation, in an attempt to understand societal trends and habits of that time. (This page) Installation view of WONDERLAND , 2016, cement, nylon stocking, plywood, iron and resin, 980 x 615 cm, at “Wonderland,” Beijing Commune, 2016. (Opposite page) TWILIGHT ZONE , 2017–18, digital print, 240 x 420 cm. Much like a historian and anthropologist, Ma has a fascination with looking at niche cultures in China with fresh eyes. Features artasiapacific.com 81 In one particular memory, Ma was walking to school with her mother when, while waiting at a crossroad, she was struck by the women’s tights that surrounded her. She realized later that the simple act of wearing different colored tights might be read as evidence of wider societal changes and began collecting vintage stockings for use in her works, in the process initiating conversations with wearers in order to contextualize the various hues and textures. She surmised that the bland, tan-colored tights, prevalent in the 1980s, represented a sense of conservative collectivism. In the 1990s, bronze shades were more popular, a result, Ma suggested, of “imported American pop culture arriving after the ‘reform and opening-up,’” and a reflection of American society’s belief that tanned skin represents good health and wealth. By the 2000s, black tights had become dominant on the market, giving figures a slickness and supporting feminine beauty ideals at the time. After 2007, Ma noticed that “tights became more colorful and had a thinner texture, signaling more freedom and autonomy.” Much like a historian and anthropologist, Ma has a fascination with looking at niche cultures in China with fresh eyes. This has led to projects that search for patterns within a sea of information. One of her recent projects, Twilight Zone (2017–18), conveys the same fastidious approach to research as in “Wonderland,” but instead of assessing society through the metaphor of variegated stockings, she looked at car models. On one of my visits to her studio, the subjects of the series—usually shown as panoramic photographs—were unmissable: roughly 100 model cars, fashioned out of stiff paper, covered the floor in long rows. Each measuring about ten by 20 centimeters, the individual models were created from photographs of cars—all brand-new and mostly luxury models—that Ma had printed flat and then folded into the vehicle’s shape. The inspiration for this project came about when Ma noticed a family member scrolling through a forum on the website autohome.com.cn, where people submit photographs of their cars for others to comment on, often as an act of grandiose self-presentation. Ma subsequently became hooked on the website’s forum, following threads and reading posts. Along the way, she spotted many common visual tropes, and probed the forum’s distinctive slang, unwritten rules and underlying meanings of this internet subculture. She explained that she noticed how users interwove introductions to their vehicles with biographical information and personal stories, highlighting a deep-seated association between car and owner as a commercialized vessel for signaling prosperity—a phenomenon that has occurred during Beijing’s recent transformation, in the first decade of the 21st century, from the city of the bicycle to a city clogged with cars. She was especially fascinated by how additional elements, such as young women posing in the car or backdrops of beautiful green landscapes and big houses in expensive gated compounds, helped users to receive the most comments and positive affirmations online. The material of these model cars is also symbolic. In traditional Chinese culture, paper often implies sacrifice, acting as a kind of conduit between life and death: on special holidays dedicated to these acts, paper money and objects are burned as an offering to ancestors, and at funerals it is common to see a burning pyre of paper money as part of a ritual to secure a full afterlife for the deceased. The uniform rows of paper cars already occupy a threshold between virtual and real, since the images are gleaned from the internet. Due to their likeness to paper offerings, the cars are additionally infused with a sense of liminality between life and death, referring to a traditional cultural act that is now inflected with a modern, perhaps excessive, form of consumerism. Ma’s work is often explicitly biographical and hyper-specific in its context. For example, From No. 4 Pingyuanli to No. 4 Tianqiaobeili (2007) is a seven-plus-minute-long video showing Ma calmly and purposefully speaking, in Mandarin, to the camera. In one stark and simple take, she talks about her own childhood. She recalls her parent’s desire for a boy and their belief 82 | NOV/DEC 2018 | ISSUE 111 that if she specialized in one particular field she would not starve, and describes her regimented upbringing, from the intense focus on mastering a musical instrument to learning how to draw (the multidisciplinary artist Song Dong was her first art teacher). As the video progresses, Ma has difficulty speaking, occasionally stopping, seemingly with pain written across her face. Near the video’s end, it seems as if there is something darkening between her lips, and in the last half minute Ma opens her mouth and extracts a razor blade, her bloodied tongue and palate now visible. These anecdotes convey a strong, collective desire for social advancement and how families and individuals will go to great lengths to realize these dreams. The photographic work Gift (2009) approaches this theme from the perspective of a slightly older Ma. In the image, we see Ma’s mouth, chin and upper chest area, as well as the necklace she wears that was crafted from her grandmother’s false teeth. Functioning as a kind of visceral heirloom, the artificial teeth-necklace is an enduring reminder of pressurizing familial expectations, which, like a piece of jewelry, can shape one’s identity. The video Embrace (2011) similarly focuses on the control that authority figures, whether parents, instructors or governmental forces, maintain over the lives and bodies of Chinese youths. The work is a two-minute-long clip of dozens of young female divers performing pikes, tucks and somersaults in the air, captured in the split-seconds of free fall. Ma slowed the frame rate in postproduction, elongating each half turn or partial twist by several seconds so as to highlight this pivotal moment in which the athletes appear to have maximum autonomy over their own bodies. It’s telling that Ma captured these brief moments of youthful freedom in falling, perhaps revealing her own personal search for such experiences. In fact, the footage was taken at a China national team training facility, where athletes as young as eight years old train in a high-pressure environment, much like the artist’s own upbringing. Perhaps not surprisingly for an artist whose practice deals with the idea of control or a lack of it—over one’s own agenda, over the female body, over the larger societal shifts occurring in Beijing and China—Ma likes to collect objects, as if to temporarily possess the narratives that they carry or for the purpose of allowing her to process conjectured histories. Her collection includes calendars from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, as well as idiosyncratic Chinese magazines from the 1980s and ’90s of nude photography. The photograph books are curious relics; not least because of how their contents are at odds with current, conservative Chinese These anecdotes convey a strong, collective desire for social advancement and how families and individuals will go to great lengths to realize these dreams. Features artasiapacific.com 83 (Opposite page) EMBRACE , 2011, stills from single-channel video: 2 min. (This page, left) PAGE 23 , 2017–18, cyanotype print, 76 x 56 cm. (This page, right) PAGE 39 , 2017–18, cyanotype print, 76 x 56 cm. government regulations on nudity. Ma told me how these kinds of photobooks came about with the emergence of the socialist market economy in the 1980s, which was accompanied by an awakening of increasingly liberal consciousness of individuality and internationalism—all topics that were generally elided in the previous era of Mao suits for all. As Ma told me, those born in the 1980s grew up in a post-socialist period, where partially nude female bodies in magazines were acceptable, contrary to the environment of earlier generations where such images were contraband. Ma makes use of her magazine collection in one of her latest series, “Page” (2017–18), wherein she takes a photograph from a magazine and exposes it using the cyanotype process, producing a scratchy blue-and-white image that resembles a ballpoint drawing. Ma emphasized that the color blue was closely associated with the clothes worn by the working class in China, and that she wanted to illustrate the contrast between this conservative association and the connection to the more liberal time of the magazines of nude bodies. The cyanotype process itself involves exposing objects or images to a mixture of chemicals to create silhouettes on paper, allowing Ma to raise questions of appearance and disappearance, and of the truth or mistruth of history, especially regarding perceptions and understandings of different generations across time. In Ma’s studio, there was a pile of drawings made by her daughter on her worktable. I saw these on my last visit and imagined Ma collecting these as materials for use in her work, in which she brings together relationships, objects, structures and stories as a way to subvert dominant readings of their histories. With China taking up a greater international presence and as Beijing’s ring roads continue to swell outward, Ma’s works stand out as increasingly crucial documents of the country’s tensions and its political and social shifts—worthy of the same careful study that brought them into existence. *Visit our Digital Library at library.artasiapacific.com for more articles on Ma Qiusha.