Veiling and Revelation in Ma Shuqing's Painting

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Ma Shuqing's painting is rooted in an ongoing process of becoming. His works are not completed in a single gesture; rather, they gradually assume their form through repeated acts of covering, adjustment, and accumulation. The colors that remain visible, the traces that faintly emerge along the edges, and the density created by successive layers together record the duration of the painting's making and constitute its most authentic presence.

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Since studying in Germany in the late 1980s, Ma Shuqing has remained committed to the exploration of abstract painting, gradually developing a pictorial language centered on color, time, and space. His long experience of moving between Beijing and Paris has enabled his practice to maintain an open and independent character. Rather than focusing on questions of cultural identity or regional experience, he returns to painting itself, considering how color generates space, how material embodies time, and how painting may be perceived as a concrete and tangible existence.

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For Ma Shuqing, painting is first and foremost an object. It possesses weight, boundaries, and texture; it occupies space and undergoes time. Abstract painting is not detached from reality; on the contrary, it is perhaps the most concrete form of painting. Color no longer serves narrative or symbolic functions but becomes a visual medium through which time and space reveal themselves. The artist continuously seeks to strip away the emotions, experiences, and meanings attached to color, allowing it to return to itself as a pure and visible presence.

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Covering, layering, and scraping constitute Ma Shuqing's long-standing working method. A single painting may require months or even years of repeated engagement, as dozens or even hundreds of layers of color are generated and subsequently concealed beneath new applications. What disappears from the surface never truly vanishes; it remains latent, continuing to exist beneath the visible plane until it re-emerges at a particular moment. Painting thus ceases to be a predetermined result and becomes an ongoing process—a practice of waiting, judging, and discovering.

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This emphasis on process also shapes Ma Shuqing's understanding of viewing. In his view, painting does not need to tell stories, nor does it require language to justify itself. It exists as a quiet presence, inviting viewers to suspend their search for meaning and return their attention to color, material, and surface. Looking is no longer an act of reading but an experience akin to touch: the gaze lingers among layers of pigment, moves across textures, and senses how time is condensed upon the plane and reactivated through perception.

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Within today's visual environment, saturated by images and information, Ma Shuqing continues to insist upon the autonomy of painting itself. What concerns him is not the production of images but the possibility of allowing painting to return to its own conditions. As layers continue to accumulate, new relationships and orders gradually emerge within the surface. Those elements that have been obscured, preserved, or hidden deep within time ultimately reappear through the act of viewing.

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Perhaps the vitality of painting lies precisely in the interplay between veiling and revelation: concealment and emergence continuously generate one another, disappearance and reappearance remain in constant motion, and the work consequently preserves an open, dynamic, and living state.