"There’s a beauty in the North, unique and matchless in the universe. One glance at her, a city would fall; a second glance, a country will collapse. But who cares if it’s a city or a country? Such beauty is so hard to find!"
- Li Yannian, Famous Musician of Earlier Han Dynasty
The characters on Ma Yanling’s paintings, like the beauty described in Li Yannian’s verses , not only transcend time and became immortal, they are the very incarnation of beauty itself.
Those unrivaled legendary beauties of bygone days, who, during their lifetimes, graced the world, have became a meaningful memory in Ma Yanling’s artworks. She skillfully weaves her private and secret emotions deeply into her lines, as thin as hair, which are drawn with the finest of all Chinese painting brushes. Those lines, filled with the artist’s mentality and personal feelings, lock the beauty’s souls and keep them under the net of her timeframe, never letting them flow away. Crossing her lines endlessly, she creates countless checks on the canvas, and each one of which is like a moment of our life, day after day, year after year, endlessly repeating itself, thus magnifying the beauty behind, as though she has been crystallized into a beaming star, glancing back at us, making us enthralled under the brilliant night sky’s galaxy. With the separation of this timeframe net, all kinds of emotion are being released. It seems that we get a brand new chance to talk to these beauties again, to touch their souls, but also to do our own deep introspection.
The cooperation between Ma Yanling and Dialogue Space gallery has been going on for three years. Ma Yanling’s artworks still keep a quiet elegance and natural touch. Her coming exhibition “Timeless Elegance”, which is just like a box of film fallen from paradise, focuses on a collection of frames of those legendary beauties, Chinese and foreign: Marilyn Monroe, as the most sexy woman in the world, Audrey Hepburn, as the definition of perfection, and Chinese movie stars Hu Die, Ruan Lingyu, top singer Zhou Xuan…Unlike Ma Yanling’s previous work, you can find the vivacity of the interlaced colors in her brand new series—the glances are so attractive and the lips are so obsessed. When confronted with these lively faces, we cannot help to regret the beauty that has gone away with them, yet we measure how precious this ceremony of history revival is for us.
“Timeless Elegance” Ma Yanling’s solo exhibition will be open from July 16 to August 28, nearly 30 pieces of work will be on show. The opening will begin at 4pm on July 16, and the artist also will attend the occasion.
