Ink meets light

Visual artist Ma Wen has spent the past six months designing the new outdoor illuminations for the Water Cube, the National Aquatic Center, which will officially open to the public in March. Zou Hong / China Daily

In the spring of 2011, Ma had her first large exhibition, Hanging Garden in Ink, in the Beijing 798 Art Zone's Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

The 20-meter-long, 3-meter-wide and 8-meter-high masterpiece is a tableau of 1,400 live plants painted in black Chinese ink, leaving only their flowers in vibrant colors. The lower half of the tableau consists of real plants that mirror the top half of the installation, creating the effect of a garden's reflection on water.

She also used ink and Chinese painting as the primary medium and driving concept in her ongoing collaboration with the New York-based fashion design team Eko-Lab.

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In her first major monograph, Jennifer Wen Ma, which was released in Beijing on Jan 5 with traditional Chinese ink as the theme, the book gives a thorough overview of her accomplishments across media as varied as installation, video, drawing, fashion design and performance art.

Curator and writer David Elliott says: "A driving flux and energy characterizes her work rather than any single medium, approach."

The 63-year-old expert, former director of the Museum of Modern Art (Oxford) also says the creativity of many artists has been rooted in the trauma of upheaval and diasporas and Ma's personal history is consonant with this.

In 1986, Ma moved to Oklahoma City in the US with her mother. She says she first thought of becoming an artist when she took an oil-painting class at the age of 16.

"I had the feeling that this was what I was searching for and I had finally found my refuge," she recalls.

She moved to New York and received her master's degree in fine art in 1999 from Pratt Institute, where she was introduced to Cai Guoqiang, a well-known contemporary artist from Fujian province who moved to New York from Japan in 1995.

From 26 to 34 years old, Ma worked as studio director for Cai.

At first, she had no clear vision of how her own art would develop. Cai was and remains a significant figure for her as "friend and mentor", yet she admits that working with him has both "hindered and stimulated development", adding that "under a big tree you have to move away from its shadow to flourish".

While her friends have linked Ma's Chinese ink-based works with Cai's gunpowder-based works, Ma laughs, saying the influence is unconscious

"He has been experimenting with gunpowder for 20 years and I have just tested Chinese ink for a few years," she says.

Contact the writer at chennan@chinadaily.com.cn.