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Artist Ma Kelu

Paint and Suffering

Commemorated in a retrospective exhibition of his life’s work, painter Ma Kelu talks about his inspiring life story, and how it shaped him as a painter

December 2011 Issue | by Yuan Ye

Accompanied by a melancholy guitar, a man’s voice began to sing: “When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be.” It was the start of a short documentary for artist Ma Kelu, played at the opening of a retrospective of Ma’s paintings over forty years at the Yuan Art Museum and Permanence Gallery in Beijing this September. The film had almost no dialogue or narration, with Ma’s own singing voice the only sound. Slow and calm, the film exuded a quiet strength and passion, and was acknowledged with thunderous applause at the end. Some of the audience were in tears.

“Ma Kelu and I share some similar life expe­riences,” said famous painter and critic Chen Danqing at the opening. “We both grew up in the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976] and were sent to the countryside to do manual labor. We taught ourselves to paint. Later, we went abroad, both living in New York before return­ing to China,” he continued. “Ma has always kept away from the mainstream and has never compromised, whether at home or abroad. He has persisted in his own art and ideals. In my heart, he is a hero.”

To Ma, such a life seemed only natural. From his early post-impressionist explorations, to later minimalism, abstract expressionism, experi­ments in classical Chinese style and recent ab­stract works in bright colors, Ma has explored a wide range of styles and concepts while ignor­ing the vogues of the booming Chinese art mar­ket. “Painting is the most significant part of my existence,” he said. Neither self-symbolization nor farfetched political interpretation has ever appeared in his work, but he had always sought to assert independence, since starting to paint in direct opposition to the government-sponsored socialist-realist art movement during the Cul­tural Revolution.

“It’s only natural,” he repeated several times during his interview with NewsChina. “Natu­rally,” he fell in love with painting. “Naturally,” he gathered with a group of self-taught artists to paint non-realistic paintings under the tough socio-political pressure of the 1970s, and just as “naturally,” they later went their separate ways. It was only when Ma sat down to write a memoir a few decades later that “tears streamed down his face” as he recalled those around him at that time.

Having been dealt a variety of blows over the years, Ma has learned to take everything in his stride. “Can you think of anything truly important or urgent in life?” he asked. “There’s nothing, right?” He has lived a freewheeling life in China and abroad for three decades. Still, seeing the launch of his retrospective exhibition with more than 150 works showcased for two months, he felt a certain contentment. “For an artist, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he said.

The exhibition matters to Ma. Meanwhile, to the audience and art critics, looking at the paintings on display offers a chance to learn about the changing spirit of the times through one man’s independent endeavour in art.

Hope and Escape

When the mother of a classmate asked the 7– year-old Ma what we wanted to be when he grew up, he uttered without a second thought: “a painter.” After fifty years, he still remembers it well. Born in Shanghai in 1954, he moved to Beijing with his father, then a businessman, at a very young age. With a rare talent and dreams of becoming a painter, Ma could not have ex­pected the chaos that lay ahead.

The memory of being denounced as part of a “bad element” family, a fatal curse during the Cultural Revolution, is a bitter one for Ma. His house was raided by zealous revolutionaries when he was in fifth grade. Ma never received formal painting classes and wasn’t even able to afford drawing materials. Fortunately, his family supported him, saving every penny to buy him tools and paint.

“The social atmosphere was very depress­ing. Discrimination was everywhere. Painting brought me so much joy,” he remembered. When he entered middle school, after the Cul­tural Revolution had just started, he gradually learned about oil painting, attracted by its three-dimensional form and rich colors. Sadly, books, especially those related to the “capitalist lifestyle” to which Western art obviously belonged, were systematically destroyed. Sources were scarce.

School education was still trying to persuade Ma that he was living in an honest, kind-hearted and glorious society. Meanwhile, Ma saw twisted and vicious behavior all around, as people became swept up in the ideology of the time. “The contrast between reality and what we learned taught me to think for myself,” said Ma. Painting brought him comfort, offered him the opportunity to express himself, and al­lowed him an escape from reality.

Between 1970 and 1972, Ma was sent to the countryside to do manual labor along with many of his peers. Besides being forced to toil in the fields, he often had to walk two miles to paint, so as to avoid the suspicious eyes in his village. In the wilderness, landscapes became a major theme of his painting.

Returning to Beijing, he gradually became close with a group of other self-taught young painters. These painters, like Ma, were tired of the dominance of socialist-realist art. They of­ten gathered together in parks or the suburbs to paint landscapes. In order to avoid been noticed and to make their tools more portable, they modified small tool boxes into all-in-one paint­ing kits. As a result, most of their paintings were small, normally about 60 square inches each.

Along with these painters, especially thanks to one whose family worked at the Ministry of Culture, Ma gained access to precious surviving cultural items, which sometimes even included the latest works from the West that were almost impossible to find elsewhere. They got hold of books on literature, philosophy and other so­cial sciences, and listened to early rock music including the Beatles and Bob Dylan, igniting Ma’s lifelong love for rock ‘n’ roll. Their group, in the words of member Zheng Ziyan, was ex­citing for its “sense of collective guilt.”

“There is no single word that can represent us,” said Zhao Wenliang, one of the leading art­ists of the group. Thus, the ‘No Name Group’ was born in the spring of 1979, when Liu Xun, then chairperson of the Beijing Artists Associa­tion, asked the painters for an exhibition, which drew 60,000 people in 22 days.
 

However, members of the No Name Group didn’t continue their collective efforts. Having served as a force for enlightenment, they soon parted ways. Their works, obviously not recognized by the orthodox art scene, were dismissed by later art groups who advocated modernism and post-modernism. As a result, they were ignored by the influx of Western art capital into China over the following decades. As a group, they were nearly forgotten by Chi­na’s art scene until some two decades later, when Gao Luming, an art critic, rediscovered their history. A touring exhibition was held in 2007.

Identity

With the social atmosphere relaxing at the end of the Cultural Revolution, the No Name Group no longer needed to stand together in resistance against the gloom of society. Ma had began to deliberately distance himself from his fellow painters. “We had stayed together for a long time and everyone had grown up. If we stayed close, the mutual influence would dilute our individual personalities,” Ma said. It was a time of fierce change. The whole country, in­cluding Ma, seemed to be pondering the direc­tion of society and their own lives.

Gradually, with the influence of more mod­ern works, his style became more abstract. The Drum and Bell Towers in Beijing had become frequent themes in his work, which had begun to display more vague and distorted character­istics. In 1982, he began selling works for the first time, and two years later, he resigned from his day-job. “I wasn’t really thinking too much about tomorrow,” he said. Painting was all he cared about.

In 1987, Ma began a half-year journeying around China. In 1988, he got an opportu­nity to go to Europe, and traveled there for 10 months before finally arriving in New York. “I was influenced by the literature of the beat gen­eration,” he said. Such a life suited him well. He observed the world and took in as many origi­nal art works as he could. Though finding it all a little hard to swallow, he learned much through the trip. After settling in New York, he began a new period of exploration.

While living in Brooklyn, a place that Ma became very fond of, he often felt perplexed in the multicultural environment. He was keen on abstract painting, but was unwilling to become one of the many international abstract painters. “You can’t help asking yourself who you are, where you are from and where you are head­ing,” he said. While he began to be influenced by traditional Chinese ink-and-wash painting, he had no desire to become a traditional Chi­nese painter.

Creating a new style, he borrowed im­ages from some of his favorite ancient Chinese painters such as Bada Shanren (1626-1705) and Dong Yuan (934-962), creating a series of large-scale landscape paintings, glazed over with a thick layer of wax to create an ethereal, dis­torted effect. “It was not an attempt to blend the east and the west,” he emphasized. “I very much dislike that style.” Ma said he was creat­ing something new. These paintings took him years to finish, and he was happy with them. At the same time, he continued to paint the street scene of Brooklyn, for the enjoyment of “pure painting.”

However, fate was to deal him a cruel blow. He moved back to China in 2006 to provide a better living environment for his estranged son, a young artist and musician who was suffering from depression. Yet, in 2007, only two weeks after Ma’s father had passed away, his son com­mitted suicide. “It still haunts me,” said Ma. Sitting quietly in his studio in suburban Bei­jing, he played his son’s self-produced album of electronic music to our reporter. In recent years, his paintings have begun to incorporate abstract strokes in bright colors. “It’s a healing process,” he said. “These works are fierce; they helped me to move on. And these colors are also my son’s favorite colors.”

Ma is a survivor. “Life itself is an incident, perplexing, uncertain and helpless,” he said. “Facing it is the only option.”

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