Beijing Commune is glad to announce the solo exhibition of the young artist Ma Qiusha opening on Sept.19, 2009. All are welcome!
Collective and individual experiences are being modified and twisted in our quick pace of contemporary life. Starting from China’s opening up in the late 1970s, the rapid modernization of cultural and economic life has been drastically breaking off the link between us and our past experience of life. Traces of life and experiences have been unceasingly wiped off and covered by new ones, and the space we are living in is losing its peculiarity and become timeless. In this process, interpersonal experience and also their relationship towards everyday life are also becoming abstract and illusory; this turns our experience, with which we connect ourselves spiritually to the world, fragile and ineffective. Ma Qiusha, a young artist born and bought up in the late 80s, is expressed her own perspective towards the collective anxiety and uncertainty among contemporary life in China.
In Ma Qiusha’s artworks, we can see how delicately and sensitively she tries to reveal hidden worries. Intimacy in family members and love relationship is always one of the major concerns in her works. She questions so much about her own experience; she contemplates on those strong but fragile relationships. We can see the morphing of Ma from her early artworks, “From 4th Pingyu Li to 4th Tianqiao Bei Li” to the video work, “We”, showing in this exhibition. She isolates time, space and other elements in her artworks, but remains the representation of hesitation, doubt and uncertainty in any kinds of intimacy with her unique sentimental approach. In “Snow White” we can experience that Ma is expressively challenging the standardized “perfection in life” by the two different video of “Snow White” dancing in the music box.
However, at the same time, we can feel that Ma is trying to resist and minimize the feeling of insecurity and uncertainty. Once you enter the gallery, you may notice there is wall-sized thin paper moved by even light wind. The artist tries to transfigure fragile hairs into a durable web to achieve a sense of certainty. And the necklace made of the fallen teeth of her grandfather can be regarded Ma’s search of “certainty” of intimacy in the dimension of time. Maybe the artist is rebuilding the faith to experience in life and its validity through these attempts.
