Young artist plays with physical distance at Beijing’s Today Art Museum

Source: Global Times Published: 2020/11/23 17:58:41

The Feast painting series on display at the Today Art Museum Photo: Courtesy of Ma Lingli

Chinese artist Ma Lingli made her debut at the Today Art Museum in Beijing with her first exhibition on Saturday.  

Curated by Yang Zi and hosted by Caissa Culture Communications, the Webbed exhibition features a number of works including videos, paintings and installation works such as Webs and Medicine, Feast and Refracted Chorus.

The exhibition's title, Webbed, often refers to the membrane between the toes of some animals - an insignificant outer skin that stretches and closes. According to the curator, the exhibition's name reflects the artist's hopes to reduce the distance between her works and viewers. 

Ma commands the physical, perceptual, and psychological distances between her works of art and the viewers, allowing them to alternate repeatedly between states of encounter, proximity and alienation. Meanwhile, the delicate materials she uses in her works - silk, polyester, or projection curtains - act as threads that tie all her art together with their subtle presence. One of the works is Feast, which is made up of a series of paintings representing various parts of the body and reflects the various sensations the artist has felt throughout her life. 

The paintings are arranged in rows, as if they were slices of a body in disorder, allowing the viewers to move between them and conjuring the fragmented "parts" of their minds into a complete yet infinite "body." 

The exhibition is set to run until December 6. 



Posted in: ART,CULTURE & LEISURE,ARTS FOCUS

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