The colors of Skin | Ma Yanhong ( de )
Young Chinese Artists, The Next Generation, Prestel Verlag, 2008-9
In traditional Chinese art, detailing the depiction of the human body was simply deemed uninteresting. In its “aesthetic of floating” (François Jullien), the physical appearance of an individual – with its quality of arresting the moment – lost its meaning. On the contrary, Ma Yanhong’s art takes its place in a new tradition of Chinese female artists who look beyond the borders of their own culture, seeking an authentic mode of expression for their generation to discuss femininity and physicalness in the medium of painting.
Sparsely clothed, leaning against a white wall next to each other, Ma Yanhong takes photos of three of her fellow students during a lunch break in one of the studio rooms of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. The pictures painted from the photos portray the young women as purposeful, but in no way relaxed. Embarrassed, one of them crosses her arms over her breasts; another totters on the outer edges of her heavy boots. Defiantly, the woman with the ponytail looks directly into the camera, staring the potential viewer in the face.
The scene feels ostentatious – there is nothing self-explanatory about it. Here something is being proclaimed – and demanded. A perceptible agreement exists between the photographer/painter and her models. Ma Yanhong presented these images – entitled Where There is No One (2002) – in the exhibition rooms of the Academy as part of her thesis work. “Everyone was nervous, the women in the pictures and the students, who recognized them at once. But what’s the difference between these pictures and the nudes which we constantly paint in class?”, the artist asks.
The themes of her work during the last years prove that for Ma Yanhong this is not about simple provocation. The series Idols (2004), for example, features famous women from various origins and professions such as the artists Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Camille Claudel, and Cindy Sherman, the writers Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf, as well as a few actresses and female singers. To the right of the portraits, the artist placed a representative work of each subject or some other indication of their accomplishments. It’s not the female body that commands attention here but the wealth of each woman’s ideas.
In the room installation Talkative Women (2007), Ma Yanhong staged a virtual women’s discussion group. On the walls of the room she hung photos and extracts of conversation representing the women participating. A table with an ashtray full of stamped-out cigarettes is placed in the center of the room. “Each woman tells how she imagines her future. What’s important for me is the feminine solidarity,” Ma explains.
The realistic painting style used by Ma Yanhong often gets conflated with that of her well-known teachers Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong. A few of her early works do indeed show a similar expressive, wide brush stroke, and an almost abrasive, alienating, and distanced use of dramatic color. “Certainly my teachers shaped me, but I’m developing ever further away from this painting technique. I am concerned with the beauty of the people I paint, their erotic charisma. And it’s not just any random model, but I have a personal connection to the women. We set up the scenes together.”
And it is precisely this that grounds the intensity of her paintings. If Liu Xiaodong’s works pursue studies of a scene or fixate on moments of societal breakdown, Ma Yanhong mirrors her own search – and that of her immediate environment – for a life commensurate with their ideals. Today’s women of urban China seize upon the same right to femininity that their parents’ generation, embroiled in the androgenic policies of the Cultural Revolution, considered morally reprehensible.
In Ma Yanhong’s works from 2007 the artist herself starts playing the role of the recurring actress, showing her posing with blonde or white curly wigs, kneeling naked in a chair, wearing seductive lingerie and red bunny ears, or posing lasciviously with a feather boa on a white sheepskin rug. Shortly after China opened up in the 1970’s, it was permissible to show pleasure in the classical beauty of Western art and even hang paintings of partially or fully undressed women in a museum. But up until a few years ago, any exhibition of excitement and lust in the work of a Chinese artist was classified as a forbidden provocation and moral danger.
An attitude that is understandable against the backdrop of the female image formed by Mao Zedong: the pragmatic, proletariat one-style-for-all uniform hid every feminine charm. Women were also expected to work until physically exhausted – the security of “family” was considered “bourgeois.” “My mother was worried about me because even as a child I liked to stand in front of the mirror. My desire to be pretty made my parents anxious. Now of course they are glad that I can live off the sale of my pictures. Still, I can’t talk to them about my art.”
How does a cool wooden floor feel when one lolls about it naked on a hot summer day? And when anything is possible, how can one decide what’s right? The three-part series Lonely Summer (2007) refl ects the sensual indulgence of undisturbed private time, but also the melancholy that such an intense form of self-reference brings. Before Rendezvous (2007), on the other hand, is marked with the pure joy of awaiting one’s approaching lover. Currently, Ma Yanhong is working on two male nudes. In all of her works, the artist feels her way in close proximity to her subject, conferring a balancing brush fl ow that varies from painting to painting, and by that turning her subject’s skin into a declaration of love to the beauty of the human body.
The interview with the artist took place in April 2008 in Beijing. I want to thank Zhao Chong for his efforts as a translator and adviser.
In: Young Chinese Artists. The Next Generation, Editors: Christoph Noe, Xenia Piëch und Cordelia Steiner.
Prestel Publishing September 2008
Hardcover, 296 pages
310 images
