Bird of Shape

The works featured in this exhibition by Ivy Ma are deeply intertwined with the living condition in her recent years. To a certain extent, The Bird of Shape reflects her conditions and outlines the silhouette of her recent life.

 

In 2021, Ivy Ma resigned from her teaching position in Hong Kong, terminated the tenancy of her apartment and studio, and embarked on a nomadic journey across the globe with her family, which continues to this day. She describes such arrangement as a result distilled from a long-term imagination and incubation, catalyzed by the societal changes in recent years, and eventually falls into place. This decision is also closely related to her daughter, who is undergoing a critical phase of self-exploration and identity formation as a teenager — a unique span of time that cultivates exceptional moments of intimacy between mother and daughter. While her daughter captures her encounters with the camera gifted by Ma, Ma closely documents with her own camera the moments when her daughter is photographing. Such interaction ultimately gave rise to Double Moment, a photography series that gently unfolds the imagery and connects the artist’s daily fragments. The mother and daughter figures are at times superimposed and resonated; these scenarios gradually lay the foundation of her self-discovery and characterize the backdrop of her artistic practice.

 

Ivy Ma's nomadic journey revolves around a romantic atmosphere, though it is far from luxurious. Having departed from her homeland and familiar surroundings, she is confronted with countless challenges and inconveniences in her daily living and artistic practice. It becomes inevitable to abandon her habitual studio practice and medium, and to reconcile with a basic, simple and unadorned approach towards artmaking. Using her camera extensively, she captured fleeting birds across the sky with burst mode. The birds are inherently transient, foraging, returning and migrating just as any other indistinct figures of collective anonymity; yet they also represent a form of transcendence, one that is evident in terms of the flow of time, and reveals the logic behind cosmic principles and fate. These fleeting silhouettes, captured across shifting temporalities of space and time, emerged as a significant motif in her work. Ma printed these images on paper, and started cutting, collaging and painting over them. Under the imaginative arrangement and reconfiguration along her ongoing ritualistic practice, the brutal tension among displacement and dislocation becomes prophecies that seem to defy time and fate. 

 

These prophecies, even not immediately fulfilled, can be folded anytime, tucked into a notebook, carried in her bag and embarked on a new journey while anticipating a moment in the future to flourish. How reassuring and comforting it is.

 

English Translation by Christine Lee

 

Ivy Ma (Ma King Chu) is a Hong Kong artist working in drawings, paintings, photography and mixed-media installations. She received her MA Degree of Feminist Theory and Practice in Visual Art, University of Leeds in the UK, 2002, BFA (Painting) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT)/The Art School, Hong Kong Arts Centre in 2001. She has held a number of solo exhibitions in Hong Kong. She was an Asian Cultural Council grantee in 2007 and received the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Awards, Young Artist Award in 2012. Her series of works Numbers Standing Still (2012) was collected by the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 2013. Another series of works, Last Year (2015), was collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in 2020.