Ma Wenting Solo Exhibition: To The Wild

Ma Wenting will present her latest solo exhibition “To The Wild” at A Thousand Plateaus Art Space in August, the second solo exhibition in 2018 after her previous solo exhibition “The Book of Disquiet”. If “The Book of Disquiet” focuses more on the personal survival experience under today’s social reality, “To The Wild” comes from the artist's preference for barren land and for the representation of subconscious spiritual dimension included in her early works. The exhibition is made up of 15 paintings. Ma’s romantic and symbolic images are full of anxiety, hopelessness and loss of life. She separates and abstracts the real scene from the chaotic world, then intercepts and cuts off its connection with its original surroundings through painting, besieges, closes, isolates and controls. Finally she reorganizes and gives meaning to it, and weaves a beautiful and fragmented dystopian world for us.

Ma Wenting, who graduated from Department of Oil Painting, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, is an extremely sensitive, delicate and powerful young female artist. Her works are full of living experience and spiritual expression on the basis of paying attention to social reality. She was always able to forcibly reassemble the broken reality in unexpected ways, and deal with the absurd and dramatic reality in a light way but never forgets to emphasize its importance. In poetic language, she presents the spiritual pain and athymia in the context of the great era. By dismembering and reconstructing the reality, she dances with all kinds of reality and absurdity in the context of this era, the coexistence of drama and reality, struggle and bondage. In her paintings, destruction and reconstruction are constantly intertwined, struggled and reconciled. Her works provide a good sample for us to understand the art and reality.

In this exhibition, Ma Wenting’s works, by depicting the aesthetic images of the wilderness, are a metaphor for the existential anxiety and spiritual dilemma that people have been facing since the crisis of modernity. For each of us, the inability to cope with the impermanence of death and the impotence of redemption, conflict and struggle, despair and helplessness. The artist’s new work is a new exploration of this eternal theme, and is directly related to the forfeiture of meaning, spiritual anxiety and the sense of powerlessness in our times.