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Jennifer Wen Ma
Jennifer Wen Ma (Chinese: 马文 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.
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.
Post graduation, she worked for eight years as the studio director for artist Cai Guo-Qiang.
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.
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Jennifer Wen Ma
Jennifer Wen Ma (Chinese: 马文 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.
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.
Post graduation, she worked for eight years as the studio director for artist Cai Guo-Qiang.
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.