Essay by Victoria Lu
Creative Director
Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai
Onishi Gallery is pleased to present Ma’chunfu’s “Elixir”, his first-ever solo exhibition in New York, as the premiere in an on-going series of Asian contemporary art projects.
Ma’chunfu is recognized as a young talented Chinese artist, graphic designer and animator from Taiwan. As a prolific artist of various productions in recent years, his award-winning works have been extensively shown in museums and art festivals in Taipei, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Italy, France and Germany, such as MoCA Taipei and European Media Art Festival, etc.
The exhibit will include Ma’chunfu’s 3D animated short film Elixir and 12 digital prints on canvas inspired by the original animation. In the 7-minute animation, Ma simulates an imaginary void to mimic the pre-Oedipal phase/space where the entity progresses from senility, maturity, puberty, and eventually to an embryo.
Highly drawn to Freud’s theory on human psychology, Ma renders an almost infant-like appearance as a result for the last stage of the dying individual. The saddening return to infancy as the aging appearance symbolizes the unconscious state of human mind of returning to innocence while reaching senility. The looping from senility back to infancy completes an ambiguous cycle where the joy of birth and the grief of death inevitably encounter. Through the disfigurement of the provocative, erotic female imagery, Ma attempts to divulge a sense of distorted beauty from manipulating and reversing the natural course of life.
Moreover, a set of limited-edition figures inspired by his latest animation series Gibar, which is televised on Channel [V] in Asia, will also be on view for the audience in New York. It will kick off for a group exhibit of contemporary Chinese art from Taiwan this September at Onishi Gallery.