Static Electricity: Ma Qiusha exhibition

Showing at Beijing Commune until Thursday 19 April

When a static electric charge builds up, you can feel the air around you change: your skin tingles, your hair stands on end, and then you get the hit! But Ma Qiusha’s latest exhibition isn’t about the moment of inevitable shock. In Mandarin, its title is Jingdian, referring to the static build-up – it’s all about the anticipation.

On the wall of Beijing Commune, three flat screens hang in a row, each showing differently coloured melting ice blocks. In ‘Red/White/Yellow’, the first rectangular lump is made from blood, the second from milk, and the third from urine. We glimpse the first minutes of melting, as the white-frosted texture of each block begins to darken, revealing a clear film of latex over the ice. The colours are meant to recall the coding of the audio jacks you would use to connect a TV to a sound system – a charge locked inside a protective plastic casing (in this case a condom). The artist links this to the intensely private, sexual and even insanitary fluids that make up our daily routine.

Although the link between static and these visceral elements seems a little tenuous, Ma’s works are often unsettling. ‘Token’ shows a dark road illuminated with a single, dim beam, filmed unsteadily as if from the back of a moving trolley. Across the dark tarmac, roughly cut organs are intermittently and violently thrown – a large kidney, brains, a liver – all accompanied by a feline purring, distorted like something from a horror film. Hot steam from the offal fills the screen and quickly disappears.

Ma’s works are as visceral as ever, yet here they are made up of traces, things left undefined. ‘Fog’ is a painting consisting of layers of watercolour built over a pattern of lace. The textures of the material remain on the paper, although the material itself has been removed. We are left only with the remains of bodily fluids, viscera and elements of man-made lace.

If this exhibition evokes in us anything, it’s a feeling of underlying foreboding and mortality. As the title suggests, it’s not about the shocks, but nor is it for the faint-hearted. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing