Osage Gallery is presents Touch, the first solo exhibition of artist Ma Shuqing in Hong Kong.

The abstract paintings featured in the exhibition present a new departure point in the artist’s oeuvre, where the artist turns away from his past pursuit of emotional expression through colours and lines, to an exploration and analysis of colour as a medium for an individual perception of time and space, ultimately seeking out possibilities of his own formal language.

Ma Shuqing often applies fields of colours to his canvas by alternatively pressing and scraping off layers of oil paints. The traces of this simultaneously accumulative and subtractive process are present in the edges of these paintings where each individual layer is partially visible. The thickness and volumes of the colours in his works are continually sculpted and re‐sculpted through these gestures, with the undulating layers and textures manifesting a sense of rhythm and movement within the paintings. The sculpting of such layers of colour also brings to the forefront the material properties of the paints used. The sense of light in the abstract paintings is in turn attained through this affirmation of the colour’s materiality. Ma Shuqing thus equates colour to a sense of light and space in his paintings, transforming the painted plane into a transparent suspended surface, and extending the depths within the painting.

The layering, obscuring and revealing of colours and their relationships in the artist’s work are a crystallization of the painter’s cognition, intuition and experience, as much as the result of serendipitous or unexpected insights Ma gains in the process of exploring the constructs of time and space. Thus conceived through the artist’s unique language and imbued with the artist’s sentiments, the artist’s explorations initiate a new dialogue between colour and colour, colour and space as well as colour and texture. In this way, Ma Shuqing’s work is permeated with spatiotemporal poetics, and affords a suspension and depth that allows viewers limitless room for imagination.

-Osage Gallery

Image: © Ma Shuqing
Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery