Time is like water, once gone it doesn’t come back; but Ma Yanling is the very person who ladles it back.

In her creative career, Ma Yanling has resorted to various modes of expression such as behavior art, photography and easel painting, different artistic languages that attest of her multi-faceted variety, thus exchanging different visual experiences with the public. This exhibition entitled « Painting time - Ma Yanling solo exhibition » shows the artist’s easel paintings of 2011 and 2012.

Among the works shown in this exhibition, apart from continuing her infinitely exquisite style, there are many new paintings portraying Audrey Hepburn or Marylyn Monroe, as well as her brand new paintings, the « My Ren Bonian series » [Ren Bonian is a renowned “flowers and birds artist” of the late XIX century], “My Andy Warhol Marilyn” series of four paintings, based on Andy Warhol work on Marilyn Monroe，with the fines lines drawn with the « leaf nerve pencil » putting a fine sheer veil on Andy’s Marilyn. In her Ren Bonian series, she takes the late artist Ren Bonian flowers and birds paintings, and after having put her gaze veil on it with that same leaf nerve brush, through her own work, her own time, her own life, Ma Yanling pays her respects to Marilyn Monroe, to Andy Warhol, as well as to China’s artistic tradition…

The artist chooses to use the repetition of lines to dispel the form. The renowned art critic Li Xianting wrote: “…Ma Yanling, with her complicated lines and checks, doesn’t not produce an outstanding visual effect, what she cares about is the whole process of painting, and what’s important is that this process is like life itself, like the life that flows. Confucius said at the river “time passes like water flows”, and this is why time is what the artists highlight, they “wear out” their time so simply, in a complex work, and each line, each check in the work is like a moment in life, day after day, year after year, over and over again, flowing like the current, and they express not ideas but rather a life experience”.

Ma Yanling was born in 1966 in Xiangfan, Hubei province; in 1989 she graduated from that city’s art institute; in 2000 she took courses at Beijing Cinema institute. She now lives and works in Beijing. Her works have been exhibited in America,Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.