MA KELU

Beijing-based artist Ma Kelu was born in Shanghai in 1954. As one of the founding members of the avant-garde artist collective “No Name Group” during the 1970s in China, Ma is a crucial practitioner of “Return Art to Ontology” in which he demands complete intellectual freedom for his art practice. In the late 1980s, he settled in New York and won a prize from the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture Art Foundation. In 2006, he returned home with a broader perspective and continued his abstractionist style. Ma is known as an “unofficial” painter, who developed a rather innovative artistic career independent from official Chinese art practices during the Cultural Revolution. His early works are close to “en plein air”, an impressionist variation of landscape painting. A series of his artworks have been exhibited in Asia, Europe, Canada, and the United States.