(I have added a couple of additional photographs.)
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| Ma Yanling in her studio, Songzhuang, Beijing, photograph Luise Guest |
When I
visited Beijing-based painter and performance artist Ma Yanling I didn’t expect to find a connection with a mysterious aspect
of Chinese history – an ancient secret female language. Ma is known for her
paintings, in which she covers her portraits of glamorous women with a fine
mesh of calligraphic lines. She is less well-known for her performance art,
more explicitly focused on female experience. As we talked, however, she
revealed that “Nüshu” (literally, “women’s writing”) is the conceptual basis for much of her
work, connecting these apparently disparate elements of her practice. The
history of Nüshu is obscure and contested, but we
know that women in Hunan Province used this script to communicate secretly,
when women were denied education and confined to the home. It was taught to
female children by mothers and grandmothers, after their feet were bound and
before they married. Messages from mother to daughter were often embroidered
into gifts and dowry items. “Nüshu is like a
Morse Code used only by women,” says Ma. In a performance work presented in
Japan she wrote Nüshu characters on sanitary towels and handed them to the
audience, who were, she says, very reluctant to take them. In another
performance Ma and her daughter wrote in this secret script on each other’s
skin. “We read it and
then wiped it away – so it is like you wipe away the language and then you wipe
away the possibility to inherit this language.” In yet another work the clothes worn by the artist and her daughter were
stitched together. “I sew people together, then cut them apart,” she says.
Ma explores the profound
relationships between women, most particularly between mothers and daughters.
Before we
met I had failed to see the connection between her delicate paintings of women (1930s
Shanghai beauties, Western movie stars, and significant female figures
including the notorious Jiang Qing) and her more obviously confronting
performances. In our conversation it became clear that the theme of “secrets” threads
through her work: the secret ways in which women were forced to operate in a
world which confined them to the domestic sphere and denied them a
voice in public discourse; the secrecy which pervades politics and public life
in China even today; and the coded communications – and miscommunications -
between generations of Chinese women. Inspired
by her love for the works of ink-painting masters, Ma applies extraordinarily
fine brush strokes derived from the 18 styles of traditional calligraphy over
the entire surface of her acrylic or oil on canvas works, a veil partially shrouding
their features. This may be
read as a net, capturing and imprisoning the woman thus contained, or as a
screen, behind which the painful realities of their lives remain obscured. Ma
explains that she sees her subjects as captive commodities - they are not in
control of their own destiny, but subjected by the power of others. “Even Madam
Mao?” I ask. “Yes, actually I think she was brainwashed by Mao. Before she knew him she was
just an actress – she was politically brainwashed,” says Ma. The result is a meditation on the darkness underlying glamour
and desire.
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| Ma Yanling, Jiang Qing, 2008, acrylic and Chinese ink on canvas. Image courtesy the artist and the White Rabbit Collection, Sydney |
A series of large photographs reveals the
other element of this artist’s practice, in which she focuses more explicitly on
uncomfortable ideas about femininity and social control. Theatrically staged
interventions in the public sphere, these performance works reflect Ma’s
interest in the work of Joseph Beuys and, most particularly, Marina Abramovic’s
‘endurance’ performances. After the horrors of 9/11 and, later, the anger of
many in China at the destruction
wrought upon Beijing by demolition and development leading up to the 2008 Olympics, Ma saw how sudden violence
could transform ordinary urban space into a locus of tragedy. She covertly
brought a convincing replica gun into crowded public spaces including buses,
the subway and, with the inevitable result of her arrest, subsequent detention
and release, Tiananmen Square. The resulting photographs of the artist holding
the gun to her own head, surrounded by crowds, reveal
the anxiety evident in public spaces everywhere post 9/11. A claustrophobic
awareness of surveillance, and the symbolically loaded significance of
Tiananmen, with the events of 1989 so shrouded in secrecy and denial, are
particularly Chinese elements of the imagery. One cannot avoid the connection
with the 1989 ‘China Avant-garde’ exhibition, closed by authorities after Xiao
Lu shot her own sculpture with a gun she brought into the gallery.
Ma sees this
body of work, in which she performs the role of “the terrorist”, and another
series in which she photographed women on an abandoned movie set representing
Tiananmen in the pre-1949 past, as part of her ongoing investigation of a
secret female Chinese history. Like her paintings these images
reveal a paradox: despair underlying beauty and grace. In another work the artist’s own naked body is tightly bound
with plastic tape, creating grotesque patterns in her flesh, and crammed into
small spaces – cupboards and suitcases – in a meditation upon the violence
meted out to uncooperative women everywhere. Ma Yanling is, above all, concerned with the female body and
the ways in which femininity is “performed”. Her female forms inhabit a ghostly,
insubstantial painted space; or else are actors in a drama of constraint and
sadness.
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Ma Yanling, untitled, 2004, documentation of performance. Image courtesy the artist
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