Jennifer Wen Ma (b. 1973) seems to be telling a story through this animated artwork, but her tale is shrouded in mystery. Her characters are silent, and however long they walk, they seem to go nowhere. Her landscape comes to life; it moves from night to day and back again. It survives floods, upheavals, and bushfires. This story leaves space for her viewers to develop their own thoughts about what is happening in the world she has created. We can also see how her own imaginative play with ink and water on glass can bring a story, characters, and a landscape to life. Like the works of conventional shanshui landscape painters, its revelations rely as much on subtle suggestion as on descriptive precision.
Wen Ma’s video animation reflects her own experiences of a life lived between the cultural worlds of New York and Beijing. The isolation of her traveler reflects the anonymity of an artist whose adult life has been spent in a nomadic state of travel between homes. The endless journey of her travelers also reflects a time-honoured Chinese virtue of you, or wandering. Her painterly skills, and the surprises of her pomo ‘splashed ink’ images draw on many hours of learning from the ink and water landscape paintings of early Song Masters. Her sense of restless movement has its sources in a sixth-century principle of generating a sense of life through the qiyun, or ‘spirit resonance,’ of the painter’s brush. Both the medium and the subject of water that have long inspired Chinese painters draw on Wen Ma’s own fascination with the restless movement of light and dark, form and transparency of New York’s East River. The allusive themes of life and rhythmic movement are sustained in her subsequent work, in the choreography for the 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Games ceremonies, and in her provocative reconstructions of traditional Chinese opera.