MA DESHENG

The unprecedented series of acrylics on canvas is the result of the last two years of pictorial researchmarking a creative renewal in the career of a visualartist whose 70th birthday will be celebrated this year.

‘Ma Desheng started in Beijing as a self-taught artist in the mid-1970s, first as a draughtsman andthen as an engraver. It was the time of the CulturalRevolution (1966-1976), which had brought themilitary into line, but also the arts. The Four Olds(old ideas, old customs, old habits of mind and oldculture) were attacked in order to found a neworder, under Mao. The death of Mao in 1976lightened the horizon somewhat, and the XingXing group was formed, whose ranks includedother illustrious exiles, such as Ai Weiwei, WangKeping and Huang Rui. Xing Xing means ‘stars’ inChinese, because, as Ma Desheng explains, ‘Thereis only one Sun, but an infinite number of stars’, aphrase which, behind its poetry, has an obviouspolitical slant, the sun referring to the GreatHelmsman.’

‘Art can not be separated, it always bears the traces of traditions. ’

Against boring socialist realism, Xing Xingadvocated individualism and experimentation. Agroup like an emergence, which escapedcensorship by exhibiting in the homes ofdiplomats or directly on the gates of the ChinaMuseum of Fine Arts in 1979. Two glorious daysduring which crowds flocked to see the work ofthese artists of a new genre before the police tookit all away. Xing Xing was an itch in the falteringmachinery of the Chinese dictatorship after Mao’sdeath. When the revolution becameinstitutionalised, we might as well propose anotherone.’

—Clément Thibault, Art critic

Ma Desheng’s new pictorial opus reveals an aesthetic inspired by the genesis of his career, a return to the rootswhere black and white were married on paper to givebirth to the marvellous inks made between 1970-1992.To restore vital breath to Qi, Ma Desheng immerses hisbrush in three colours of vinylic: black, which he calls thequeen of colours, white, which he calls the king ofshades, and grey to reveal abstract forms that each ofus, depending on our point of view, could relate eitherto rocky bodies in balance or to dancing women.

Renewing the use of the pictorial tradition, the formsmove in space, find their reflection in the gesture of aman whose contemporary plastic maturity is no longerto be proven. The gesture freed from any traditionaltechnique is mastered and becomes more alive withoutbeing a victim of randomness. Abstract formations areborn under the brush to find the absolute balancebetween fullness and emptiness, between soul andmatter. It is here again that the whole Taoist philosophyfrom which Ma Desheng draws his energy takes onmeaning. The Full connected to the drawn forms givesrise to figurative elements (mountains, rocks, humanbeings etc.). Emptiness is synonymous with the absenceof form, giving way to dreams and imagination.

Ma Desheng’s monumental bronze sculptures show us depersonalised figures that transcend thehuman condition and weave the links between thepalpable elements (the earth), on which humanbeings stand and grows, and the immaterialelements (the sky), with which man rises and beginsto dream. For Ma Desheng, the stone is the catalystof all beings animated by energy, the witnesssupport of eternity.

Ma Desheng is a painter and sculptor of stone, seduced by its permanence and its ‘soul’ becauseit is born of telluric forces and altered by themillennia. His heavy and unbalanced stones arethe images of a paroxysmal moment, of a fallannounced or in progress. The fragility of stonesthat spill, like a response to a broken body.

—Clément Thibault, Art Critic

Ma Desheng participates in the renewal of Chinese painting by giving a central place to the humanbody, where the landscape dominated in anancestral way.

The inks on paper bear witness to the style andsubjects he has loved since the early 1980s. Thebroad brushstrokes, the rejection of academicrules of composition, the stylisation of thelandscape and the female nude, with obvioussexual connotations, underline Ma Desheng’s wishto renew the traditional use of ink painting througha technical and thematic breakthrough.

‘Ma Desheng carries with him all the nuances of the fragility of balance. In life, everything is like hanging by athread that should be climbed, knowing that at all timeswe can fall. This is what inspires me. These rocks whichpile up in this flagrant instability, paradoxically sosoothing ... From his first stone laid in China to thosepainted on his canvases, Ma Desheng has never ceasedto incarnate the ‘stone beings.’ Like the small pebblesthat compete with the mountain, the artist urge to reachthe top. His resistance of granite, he is also its fallibility.

Ma Desheng paints stone beings with sensitive hearts on large canvases, Pebbles for some paintings androcks for other works ... No scale allows them to beplaced in a measurable field because the background issoberly textured or, sometimes smoothed by a solidcolour. Only these salt and pepper architectural massesgenerate space. Their gibbous—lunar appearance!—isrendered by energetic strokes of brushes and fingers,visible both in the outline of the gesture and in thedensity of the pictorial material.’

—Anne-Laure Péressin, Art critic