Artist's Talk | Jennifer Wen Ma: From Ink Art to Public Projects

A highlight of our current exhibition “Metamorphosis: Chinese Imagination and Transformation,” is Jennifer Wen Ma’s In Furious Bloom III . This dramatic image is taken from an ink installation: a large chrysanthemum is painted with ink, and the flower blossoms through the black to reveal its power of resilience. It is a perfect visual metaphor for an artist whose work is in constant, powerful evolution.

In this final gallery public program of this season, Jennifer Wen Ma will trace her own artistic development, guiding us from the intimate world of ink painting into the public art sphere. She will begin with her decades-long studio practice, experimenting with Chinese ink, and expand to art in the public realm. These include engaging her community roots in Everchange, a permanent public work for the rebuilding of 70 Mulberry Street after a devastating fire, as well as her latest commission to design the monumental new Chinatown Welcome Gateway.

Join Jennifer Wen Ma and Dr. Susan L. Beningson, exhibition curator, to hear how an artist’s vision can blossom from the studio into the heart of the community.

For more information and tickets, please contact Tracy Jiao at dGppYW8gfCBjaGluYWluc3RpdHV0ZSAhIG9yZw==.

About the Artist

Jennifer Wen Ma (b. 1973, Beijing) is an interdisciplinary visual artist, whose boundary-defining practice moves across installation, painting, drawing, oral history, public art, video, and performance, bringing together unexpected elements, narratives, and traditions, merging philosophical inquiry with contemporary methodology to create poetic, emotionally resonant, multi-sensorial experiences.

Ma’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally across institutions, venues and festivals. A selection include: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Lincoln Center Festival, New York; Spoleto Festival USA, Charleston; National Art Center, Tokyo; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; National Art Museum of China, Ullens Center For Contemporary Art, Beijing; Vancouver Art Gallery; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC.

Ma has created large-scale public art projects and a range of site and time relevant projects involving and responding to the community. Her highly anticipated commission to create the Chinatown Welcome Gateway public monument is scheduled to unveil in 2030. Other public art installations include: Everchange, New York City Public Design Commission for 70 Mulberry Street, schedule for 2028; The Landscape of Metamorphosis, MGM Cotai, Macau, 2022; Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube, The National Aquatic Center, Beijing, 2013; among others.

In 2019, Ma was a recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Installation opera Paradise Interrupted won the international award from Music Theatre Now in 2016. In 2008, she received an Emmy for the US broadcast of the opening ceremony of Beijing Olympics, where she was a core creative team member.

Ma teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She lives and works between New York and Beijing.

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