• Artist: Ma Shu Qing
• Medium(s): Painter
• Born in: Tianjin, China
• Exhibitions List 

Ma Shuqing’s exposure to the arts began when he was a child, influenced by his father, an amateur painter who studied photography and portraiture and enjoyed painting portraits of movie stars. Fascinated by his father’s portraits, Ma Shuqing began copying them and soon discovered a passion and talent for painting. At age 16, he left home to engage in professional art studies at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts where his painting career began.

According to Ma Shuqing, “One of the reasons that painting is so difficult is that even before we start to paint, the canvas before our eyes is not blank, but filled with our projected visions of other subjects. It is more and more difficult for us to capture and grasp something of our own in this vast world.” The painter seeks to express his own inner voice through his paintings and does so by questioning himself and immerging into a world of his own. Once he reaches this state of spirit, his mind is tranquil and serene. Through this sort of meditation, he manages to paint without being influenced and manipulated by his thoughts and preconceived ideas. As he once said “what I paint is not what I see”.

Ma Shuqing also recognizes that it is not just the mind that imposes limitations, the canvas itself implies a physical limitation. He manages to overcome this through technical abilities and natural talent. The artist believes that “The painter is a magician, who has control over colors and can decide which colors fade behind, and which colors come forward, visually. This magic occurs over time on the canvas – the fictional space.”

In this exhibition Ma Shuqing has used real objects for inspiration--plastic dolls. However, once again he does not paint what he sees. The dolls take on a new form and identity, and are transformed into abstract figures, human-like bodies that interact in a dream-like, fantasy world. The soft palette and delicate movement of the paintbrush, create an erotic rhythm, to which the naked bodies dance, revealing what could be the intimate language of lovers. The spiritual and almost celestial-like quality given to these lovers, reinforce the artist’s desire to reach for a poetic consciousness that goes beyond superficial beauty, beyond a material world of perfect-looking plastic dolls.

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