Beijing Commune is pleased to announce the opening of Ma Qiusha’s fifth solo exhibition “Wonderland” at the gallery on June 15th, 2016. The exhibition will continue until Auguest 6th, 2016.

The exhibition title “Wonderland” derives from a mega-scale amusement park extravagantly built in the 1990s in Changping district, the fringe of Beijing city. Like the Chinese exhibtion title “沃德兰”, the park’s Chinese name wasa phoneic transliteration from the English word. Eagerly anticipated at the time, this giant town of spectacles and ambition claimed to be the “world’s largest amusement park”, only to find itself delayed for complex reasons and was eventually quietly demolished after decades of abandonment.

Exhibited in the main hall, the eponymous work Wonderland is a new installation that Ma began working on since last year. Smashed cement slabs of the same model are wrapped in nylon stockings in different shades of nude, then reattached into new blocks. Nude nylon stockings have certainly gone out of fashion today for their poor elasticity and artificial colors, but were once trendy items among Chinese women in 80s and 90s. In the artist’s retrospection of her childhood, nude nylon stockings do not signify idiosyncrasies, but the masking of bodies and their inherent differences. While preparing and producing the work, Ma used clear nail polish to patch the snags and tears on the stockings——the precise way in which Ma’s mother used to fix her stockings in a time far before the ubiquity of overproduction. The body as a both private and collective entity, the memory and texture of an intimate object worn next to the skin, and the aesthetics of a bygone era interweave and meet in this Wonderland that enclothes a large proportion of the exhibition floor.

Source: artlinkart.com