Jennifer Wen Ma Commissioned Project for SH Contemporary

Who Would Have Expected to Encounter Ni Zhan’s Gentlemen in S-Chanf?

Jennifer Wen Ma

Chinese ink, plants, soil | 2011

Smitten by Chinese ink’s resilience and simultaneous gentleness, Jennifer Wen Ma creates a stunning new installation. Her fragile and poetic three-dimensional tableau vivant, inspired by traditional Chinese landscape, features hand-selected plants, painted black by the artist with kilograms of Chinese mo, in an attempt to create an effect as powerful, if not more, of classic ink painting compositions. As Wen Ma poetically transcends the traditional legacy of ink, her installation allows plants to blossom in time, referring both conceptually and formally to the significant time component of the use of ink in Chinese painting.