Ma Wenting’s latest solo exhibition themed on “The Bad World” showcases several series of paintings by the artist over the past decade at Shixiang Space, including large-size paintings on social scenes around 2013, “Everything” series that she incorporated more unrealistic elements into realistic scenes, as well as “Bad Thing”, “Here and Now” and “Futile” series that have lasted from 2019 through to the present, which constitute the highlight of this exhibition. If Ma Wenting was compared to a director, she has withdrawn from her signature medium of long-range “shots” and jumped into groups of close-ups, thus the subject matters of her paintings also transfer from the transcendent “fields” of human society to the micro daily life of “things”.

Exhibition View of “Ma Wenting: The Bad World”

I. The So-called “Bad Thing”

Zhao Tingyang wrote at the beginning of Investigations of the Bad World, “The world is first and foremost a bad world, but people fantasize about a good world. People study the bad world through politics and imagine the good world through morality.”¹ If the purpose of investigating the “bad world” is to better “deal with” it, so as to better imagine and construct a less bad world, then in Ma Wenting’s creative sequence in recent years, what purpose are these “bad things” that suddenly break into for? For an artist who has always emphasized “art for life’s sake” and is good at large-scale creation while being adept at reconstructing social scenes with a holistic vision, why did she suddenly pay attention to these inconspicuous wastes around her that are on the verge of corruption?

Ma Wenting scatters the strength of close-up on these things that cannot escape the fate of garbage sorting or abandonment: rotten oranges, half-eaten apples and bread, withered bouquets, bad teeth of people and animals, crumpled waste paper, shredded meat, skeletons, corpses and diseases... Material things must decease, and the artist tries to touch on the ultimate topic of death and life in her “Bad Thing” series.

Exhibition View of “Ma Wenting: The Bad World”

Like “Here and Now” series which is also exhibited in the exhibition, “Bad Thing” series was started in 2019. New external and internal conflicts permeated the artist’s paintings from reality in a more acute and “autistic” way when the pandemic prevailed. When everyone was put into a new situation of existence at the same time, the artist recalled the beginning of creating “Bad Thing”: “Even objectively, I cannot get more possibilities for external projection, so I start to pay more attention to the smaller, more concrete things around myself.”

The new reality also stems from the changes in Ma’s life, for she experienced childbirth while facing great turmoil in both physical and personal life since she is in her forties. Catalyzed by both external and internal influences, the artist began to truly examine the inescapable cruelty of the existence of living beings. Just as her paintings were unfolded by social events in the past, she tried to look directly at a certain actuality in reality, society and the era. As anthropologist Xiang Biao has put forward “Self as Method”, Ma Wenting starts from herself and her surroundings in “Bad Thing”, observing and recording the things around her that arouse her intuition, no matter how small, concrete, and marginal they are, and even they are generally characterized as waste.

Bad Thing No.12, Oil on canvas, 90×90cm, 2025Bad Thing No.15, Oil on canvas, 90×90cm, 2025

“Futile” series and “Bad Thing” series are like twins, both from her observations of useless things, while “Futile” series touches on the existence of inorganic matter – broken shoes, old masks, crumpled toilet paper, and the ubiquitous broken tiles related to Chinese life experience... The artist takes the pun of “Futile” in the Chinese context, “Chinese say bad things, they can also refer to broken things, or the negative state of things, and the same is futile, which can be both discarded and a psychological feeling of ‘powerlessness’ in a specific state.”

Futile No.1, Oil on canvas, 50×40cm, 2025Futile No.2, Oil on canvas, 50×40cm, 2025

Material decay is irreversible, no matter how the world changes, even if life seems to be static, but the movement of matter happens every day, which is the irresistible fate of human beings. Through the inescapable nature of matter and man, “Bad Thing” points to the inevitable discussion of the disappearance of matter, and it also reveals a certain psychological state that recognized by the artist as a member of the emergency state, and other thinking on the overall situation of the world.

The symbolism and reality contained in it are expressed to the greatest extent in “Bad Thing No. 16”. Blurring the boundaries between reality and non-reality, the artist draws inspiration from the film Oppenheimer and shares similar concerns about the unpredictable fate of the human world.

Bad Thing No.16, Oil on canvas, 90×90cm, 2025

With the continuous accumulation of life experience and artistic practice, these new works are deeply intertwined with the new reality recognized by the artist, and what remains unchanged is Ma Wenting’s high sensitivity to the fluctuations of reality, as well as her belief in documenting and intervening in reality through art. Just as “Bad Thing” was inspired by the book Investigations of the Bad World, the realization of “bad” is, in a sense, the only way to regain confidence and hope, and to imagine and construct “good”.

Exhibition View of “Ma Wenting: The Bad World”

II. Ma Wenting’s “Field” and “Matter”

Ma Wenting is a native of Lanzhou, Gansu Province of China. The Northwest of China in her childhood memories had the sandstorms from the Loess Plateau covering the sky and the sun, and the winter was long and cold. Ma’s growing experience there has endowed her with a unique visual experience, while the early memories and experiences of struggling to survive in the constant struggle between man and nature also implanted a certain sense of struggle in her bones, both of which profoundly influenced her later creative direction.

In 2001, Ma Wenting was admitted to the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, unlike the painters of the Southwest China, she tends to convey her compassion for society, history and human condition from a spiritual, holistic rather than individual perspective at the beginning of her creation.

Sichuan Fine Arts Institute is renowned for social themes on both trauma paintings and local paintings, and Ma Wenting took a similar aspect of the art tradition in criticizing reality, while combining with the transcendent pursuit and humanistic philosophy of the northern art group, injecting a certain sublime style into her creation.

Around 2007, Ma Wenting instinctively sought inspiration from her hometown, and successively created a series of landscapes based on the Yumen Oilfield, with deserted streets, barren natural landscapes, and dilapidated factories... Through deep colors, she shows the insignificance of human beings in the face of natural and social changes, and the absence of human beings brings about a certain sense of detachment and sublimity like the “perspective of God”, which is not only a question of the value and meaning of human existence, but also outlines the collective memory that can trigger people’s emotional resonance in the period of modernization and transformation.

The White House, Oil on canvas, 147×210cm, 2011

Critic He Guiyan believes that Ma Wenting’s early landscapes are often in a state of intuition, emotion, and even unconscious choice, as she transforms poetic landscapes into a sociological landscape through her observation of human and natural landscapes, so that “poetry and reflection finally go together.”²

In this exhibition, “Here and Now No. 6” series is a relatively independent group, which echoes the early stage of her creation. In recent years, she has repeatedly followed the guidance of her emotions to capture the abandoned traces of the Northwest desert, and her landscapes are not only the projection of the real world to the outside, but also the intuitive projection of her life experience, thoughts and emotions, and her similar feelings continue to this day.

Here and Now No. 6, Mixed media on paper, 60x100cmx4,2024

As curator Bao Dong writes in the preface, “She has never intended to make her creation become one of those ‘genre’ paintings.” ³ The artist was not satisfied with the series of her hometown landscapes, and she did not want his paintings to repeat themselves in the process of rapid symbolization, or to be classified and solidified into the creation of some vernacular narrative, and after further thinking about the relationship between artistic self-discipline and social nature, she decided to go further to the latter.

2010s witnessed China’s rapid rise as the world’s factory, and behind the carnival-like developing image, Ma Wenting who is keen to perceive the information of the era carried out a new stage of creation based on social images with calm, confused and slightly uneasy emotions. From nuclear radiation detection to Foxconn’s staff dormitories, the artist invites the viewer to enter the social scenes of the current era through large-scale paintings that are realistic and ex-naturalism.

For example, “A Prophecy of a World”(2013), depicts the incident scene of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which is not only the depth of the social image itself, but also the contemporary spiritual scene full of uncertainty, fragility and anxiety in the stage of rapid social development through paradoxical montage of images and spatial splicing.

A Prophecy of a World, Oil on canvas, 160×300cm, 2013The Golden Series: Opposite, Oil on canvas, 70x60cm, 80x60cm, 2015

From “Pope” series which paints portraits of celebrities to discuss the will to power, “Everything” series which deconstructs and reorganizes objects or scenes in daily life into visual landscapes, to “Here and Now” and “Bad Thing” series that respond to people’s lives and spirits in recent years since 2019, the artist has gradually moved from the “remote” social scenes to the scenes of her daily life. From “field” to “object”, her criterion remains unchanged: whether her paintings keep up with reality or not. In today’s world, where external certainty is becoming more and more difficult to grasp, keeping up with reality also means keeping up with the mind, and in the artist’s case, the two paths are gradually bridged, constituting a clear trajectory of her persistent search for the “truth”.

 十X, Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2017Everything No.9, Acrylic on polyester fabric, 31x31cm, 2017Transparent Mary, Oil on canvas, 65x100cm, 2018

III. “Realism is not a style”

In many interviews, Ma Wenting has talked about how to strike a balance between the two concepts of “art for art’s sake” and “art for life’s sake”. In the artist’s view, the artistic self-discipline represented by “art for art’s sake” is ultimately for life, but in an indirect way.

Therefore, although Ma Wenting considers herself a lyrical realist painter, “realism” here refers more to her way of thinking and creative motivation, rather than to naturalistic things. Curator Bao Dong described her paintings, which are mostly composed of images, pigments, and color blocks, and the brushstrokes are just right, perhaps closer to “preserving  realism in the sense of Lukács, which organizes and grasps existence in the fragments of experience.”

Exhibition View of “Ma Wenting: The Bad World”

In “Everything No. 2”(2017), at a potentially violent hunting scene which is composed of a fox and a shotgun, the artist uses a large number of straight lines, acute angles, cut and superimposed canvases, so that the real and the unreal space are entangled in the same plane; In “Here and Now No. 4”, under the forcible rule of hard-edged lines, the severed limbs of the Tibetan Buddhist Dharma King are twisted together with the forcibly severed tree trunk, conveying the spirit of anger, resistance and accusation against all kinds of violence. “Realism is not a style, but the common foundation of all great literature.” The artist also cites the Hungarian philosopher Lukács. Its expression in her work is reflected in the isomorphic relationship between its fragmented formal way and the fragmented, fractured, and discontinuous world of post-modernity.

Everything No.2, Oil on canvas, 147x210cm, 2017Here and Now No.4, Oil on canvas, 300x200cm, 2024

Recently, the artist’s approach still seems realistic, but it expands more room for expression on a smaller scale: “Here and Now No.7” depicts a corner of her studio, where a certain autism is about to emerge under the combined effect of straight lines and almost overflowing compositions; “Here and Now No.1” highlights the change in her approach, from the “realism” that responded to social reality in the past to the depiction of highly focused and equal details, which resonates with her state of mind.

Here and Now No.1, Oil on canvas, 300x200cm, 2024Here and Now No.7, Oil on canvas, 300x200cm, 2024A Corner of Ma Wenting's Studio

Over the past five years, the artist has maintained the speed of one painting in one or two months, the repeated “wearing” of each brushstroke, the infinite pursuit of details, and the condensation of an intriguing and indomitable power within her paintings, so as to add a heavy sense of reality and indescribable personal experience in life to the daily images, and inject a certain psychological reality into the paintings. Therefore, the process of painting has become Ma Wenting’s “cultivation” based on temporal nature, rather than a simple translation of images, and the formal language has become an intermediary rather than an end in her insight into the inner structure of society and the spiritual world.

Through the symbolic fragments of life and the scattered poetry conveyed in “Here and Now”, “Bad Thing” and “Futile” series, the artist intends to explore how to touch the truth in the eyes of individuals in the digital age, and reawaken the thinking about existence and what a better world is. Ma Wenting has not deviated from the “realism” concept of art that she has always adhered to, or in other words, the so-called “realism” has long been the basic method for her to understand, think and intervene in the world. In the repeated balance between “art for art’s sake” and “art for life’s sake”, Ma Wenting always hopes to return to the latter.

Exhibition View of “Ma Wenting: The Bad World”Text(CN) by Mengxi, Trans. and ed. by Sue/CAFA ART INFO

Image Courtesy of the Artist and Shixiang Space

Notes:

1. Zhao Tingyang, Investigations of the Bad World: Political Philosophy as First Philosophy, Beijing: Chinese Renmin University Press, 2009, 04pp.

2. He Guiyan, “Ma Wenting’s Introduction: Landscapes with ‘Hidden Pain’”. Fine Arts Literature, 2013 (01):50-51pp.

3. Preface to “Ma Wenting: The Bad World” by Bao Dong