Platform China Contemporary Art Institute will present Ma Kelu's solo exhibition "Echo" on November 16th, showcasing the traces left by his over 50 years of artistic practice—a journey where he has used painting to reenact the time traversed by life itself. The term "echo" harbors multiple meanings: life stands like an immense, towering wall, against which the shocks and pressures of reality inevitably collide, resonating with a tremor that vibrates the eardrum. In the dimension of time, these "echo" also demonstrate a penetrating power. Whether it is today or 30, 50 years ago, these distinct moments in time have always spoken individually, waxing and waning within the artist's own narrative, surging and lurking, harmonizing into a polyphonic concerto of echoes.
In the 1980s, Ma Kelu gradually shifted from landscape sketching with the "Nameless Painting School" to exploring abstract painting. This choice interacted with the artist's personal situation and reflected a generation's detachment and contemplation within cultural experiences and historical contexts. At that time, a group of artists, including him, were situated in the crevices under the intense impact of multiple cultures. Unlike others who engaged in binary comparisons between cultures and repeatedly confirmed their positions, Ma Kelu chose a different path. He had no intention of blending or stirring different contexts and opinions in his creations, but instead continuously clarified his own direction through a process of elimination, neither committing to any particular stance or ideology nor getting close to institutionalized discipline. These choices were both proactive and unknown.
The "Echo" series featured in this exhibition is a collection of Ma Kelu's works after 2016, casting a retrospective glance at the series of practices he undertook in the 1980s. Referencing his creations from over 30 years ago, he has rediscovered the unintentional, shelved, and even forgotten aspects of past painting language experiments, gathering new insights from them. If in his previous works, the abstract "nothingness" was grounded in a heavy sense of reality and life experience, with the unspoken memories of the era and encounters with reality taking place on the canvas, bearing the passion and agony of the concrete, then in the new "Echo," he treats this subject as a kind of self-facing "rubbing." As the covered past is about to be revealed but the act of "rubbing" is not yet complete, this is the artist's Schrödinger moment. We do not know whether these compressed encounters will remain here or move to another canvas. Two unknowns coexist simultaneously, becoming a superimposed state of shared conditions. Only when the "rubbing" is complete can we escape this sense of criticality and know which shoe has dropped. In the new "Echo," Ma Kelu unveils the next layer of the "rubbing," stripping away the response to events and adopting a method akin to "elimination," allowing the marks of life to step back from presence and returning to a simple, rudimentary abstract language. From the "something" to the "nothing" in painting, it seems that the image which is not there becomes the image itself, like a reflection in water, blurred yet real.
As Ma Kelu said, "I haven't painted anything, but I know something more important is already there." He is sparing with language to explain or introduce his paintings, like a silent stone washed into new life. He chooses to listen to his paintings, his movements, and the sounds his thoughts mobilize; he allows encounters to naturally emerge, rather than meticulously crafting them; he embraces damage, stains, incompleteness, imperfection, roughness, rejecting refinement, caution, and splendor, yet giving birth to a simple elegance. Time squeezes out furrows that are hard to smooth, also bringing more unexpected echoes, and Ma Kelu has always chosen "elimination" over "confrontation." Perhaps elimination is itself a form of establishment, becoming a monument in its silence.
By Yu Chang
