Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, cease for a moment your insipid chatter and your narcissistic contemplation of mediocre artists gathered in your exhibition openings. It is time to look elsewhere, towards the East, towards this China of which you generally know only the clichés, and sometimes not even that. I will talk to you today about Ma Ke, this Chinese painter who transforms the canvas into an existential battlefield, into a scene of perpetual metamorphoses, this daring tightrope walker who crosses the chasm separating tradition and innovation with a nonchalance that would make you pale with envy.
Ma Ke was born in 1970 in Zibo, China, but this is not a story of a child prodigy that I will tell you. His journey is rather that of a constantly awakening consciousness, of a man who has been able to transform his thought into pictorial act. Trained first by his father in traditional Chinese techniques and Russian social realism, then at the Academy of Fine Arts of Tianjin and the Central Academy of Fine Arts of Beijing, Ma Ke discovered Western art as a revelation, a new breath that allowed him to imagine other possibilities, other freedoms.
But what makes his work so interesting is his way of navigating between two worlds, oscillating between the expressive power of Western abstraction and the meditative depth of Chinese tradition. In his canvases, often populated by solitary figures or in small numbers, bathed in monochromatic backgrounds, Ma Ke creates a space of encounter between cultures, an experimental field where he can explore the limits of representation and expression.
Look at this work entitled “Seeking the Sword”, where Ma Ke revisits the classical Chinese parable with a contemporary touch that transports us directly into the Kafkaesque universe of metamorphosis. This scene is not just a simple illustration of an ancient tale, it is a visual metaphor of our modern condition, suspended between collective memory and individual disorientation. As Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his analysis of Kafka’s stories: “Metamorphosis is that precise moment when the soul becomes aware of its own imprisonment” [1]. Ma Ke captures exactly this moment of awareness, where the human being realizes its tragic condition while seeking an escape.
His pictorial technique, with these energetic and expressive brushstrokes, these intense colors that emerge from monochromatic backgrounds, evokes the inner torments of modern man. These figures that sometimes seem to dissolve into the background, sometimes emerge with violence, are not without recalling the reflections of Emil Cioran on the erasure of the individual: “We are all at the bottom of a hell where each moment is a miracle” [2]. Ma Ke creates precisely these miraculous moments where the human being, in all its fragility, nevertheless manages to assert its presence in the face of the forces that seek to engulf it.
What immediately strikes in the work of Ma Ke is this constant tension between appearance and disappearance, between presence and absence. In the series “Riding the Void”, inspired by a poem by Tang Wei Zhuang, Ma Ke illustrates this spiritual quest with striking intensity. The rider, suspended in the void, symbolizes the human aspiration to transcend its earthly condition. One could see in it an almost literal illustration of what Peter Sloterdijk calls “tense verticality”, this human propensity to want to elevate itself above its condition: “The human being is the one who must surpass himself to be” [3]. The verticality that traverses Ma Ke’s work is not only formal, it is profoundly philosophical.
The landscapes painted by Ma Ke are never idyllic places or naturalistic representations, but mental spaces, territories of the soul. In “Empty Mountain”, the landscape becomes a quasi-metaphysical presence, a place where the human being is confronted with its insignificance in the face of immensity. This approach inevitably evokes the reflections of Vladimir Jankélévitch on the mountain as a metaphor for the philosophical quest: “The mountain is not a goal, but a means; it is not an end, but a path to see further” [4]. Ma Ke thus transforms the traditional Chinese landscape into a contemporary existential space.
The influence of Jung and his theory of the collective unconscious is also perceptible in the work of Ma Ke, notably in his way of using universal archetypes while reinventing them in a personal pictorial language. The horse, a recurrent figure in his work, is not without evoking what Jung called “primordial images”, these innate representations that inhabit our collective unconscious [5]. But Ma Ke does not content himself with reproducing these archetypes, he transforms them, deforms them, breathes new life into them that corresponds to our troubled era.
Take, for example, his series on “Metamorphosis” inspired by Kafka. Ma Ke does not seek to literally illustrate the story of the Czech writer, but rather to capture its essence, this existential anguish in the face of transformation. The deformed, fragmented bodies that populate these paintings are not without recalling what Deleuze and Guattari have theorized under the concept of “body without organs”, this aspiration to escape organic determinations to reach a state of pure intensity [6]. Ma Ke, through his work on the human figure, invites us to rethink our relationship to the body, to identity, to transformation.
In his recent works, Ma Ke has turned towards a more abstract exploration, using points, lines, planes, spheres and geometric shapes to construct images of animals or human figures. This more geometric approach, which recalls certain Cubist researches, testifies to his constant will to renew his pictorial language, to find new ways of saying the human. As Paul Klee wrote, “art does not reproduce the visible, it renders visible” [7]. Ma Ke, through these abstract compositions, seeks precisely to render visible the invisible, to give form to these forces that traverse us and constitute us.
Ma Ke’s palette, often dominated by shades of gray or pink, creates an atmosphere that is both intimate and unsettling. This chromatic restriction is not a sign of limitation, but on the contrary of concentration, of intensification of expression. As Alberto Giacometti noted, “the more I look, the more I see gray” [8]. This grayness that invades some of Ma Ke’s canvases is not a sign of disenchantment, but rather of lucidity, of a will to see the world as it is, beyond colored illusions.
What distinguishes Ma Ke from many contemporary Chinese artists is his refusal to play the card of “exoticism” or cultural identity as a commercial argument. He does not seek to create an “typically Chinese” art that would meet Western expectations, nor to mimic Western artistic fashions. His approach is profoundly sincere, anchored in a personal reflection on the human condition and on the expressive possibilities of painting. As the art critic Karen Smith rightly pointed out, Ma Ke could well be “the first authentic modernist painter of China” [9].
The work of Ma Ke reminds us that true art is never a simple matter of style or technique, but always a matter of inner necessity, of a personal vision of the world. In an era where contemporary art often seems to be reduced to marketing strategies or intellectual postures, the work of Ma Ke reminds us what painting can be when it is practiced as a true existential exploration: a space of freedom, of questioning, of transformation.
What touches me personally in the work of Ma Ke is this way he has of creating images that haunt us, that continue to live in us long after we have turned away our gaze. His paintings are not decorative objects intended to adorn our interiors, but troubling presences that question us, destabilize us, transform us. As François Cheng wrote about traditional Chinese painting: “A true painting is one where we enter as in a real landscape, where we can dwell, wander and return” [10]. Ma Ke’s paintings are precisely these spaces habitable by the imagination, these territories where the soul can wander and get lost.
Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, if you are looking for an art that comforts you in your certainties, that flatters your taste for the pretty or for the trendy conceptual, go your way. But if you are ready to confront a painting that looks at you as much as you look at it, that questions you about your own condition, that invites you to a true aesthetic and existential experience, then Ma Ke’s work deserves all your attention. For what he offers us is not simply paintings to contemplate, but a space to think, to feel, to be fully alive.
Ma Ke continues to live and work in Beijing, tirelessly pursuing his pictorial quest. His work, still too little known in the West, amply deserves to be discovered and meditated upon, not as an exotic curiosity from the East, but as one of the most authentic and profound voices of contemporary world painting.
- Nabokov, Vladimir. Littératures. Fayard, 1985.
- Cioran, Emil. Le mauvais démiurge. Gallimard, 1969.
- Sloterdijk, Peter. La mobilisation infinie. Christian Bourgois, 2000.
- Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien. Seuil, 1980.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. Les racines de la conscience. Buchet/Chastel, 1971.
- Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix. Mille Plateaux. Éditions de Minuit, 1980.
- Klee, Paul. Théorie de l’art moderne. Gallimard, 1998.
- Giacometti, Alberto. Écrits. Hermann, 1990.
- Smith, Karen. Curator of the exhibition Ma Ke, “Life Most Intense”, at Platform China, Beijing, from April 20 to June 2, 2012.
- Cheng, François. Vide et plein: le langage pictural chinois. Seuil, 1991.
