Since Ada: MA Kelu 2016 - 2024: Solo Exhibition

ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI is pleased to announce MA Kelu's solo exhibition Since Ada: MA Kelu 2016-2024 from 8 March 2024 to 27 April 2024.

Since the Ada series, MA Kelu bid farewell to the stage of painting with research methods and cognition, reshaping himself in the process of freely expressing himself; also, through the Ada series, he pushed the overall system of over fifty years of artistic work to new heights.

Accompanied by Bruce Lee's roar of Ada before each confrontation, the performance begins, hence the name of the Ada series. The images of 2016 present an array-like composition dominated by rubs and brushstrokes. By abandoning previous artistic theoretical frameworks and using the simplest elements for creation, the Ada series attained unprecedented freedom: extensive use of materials, diverse handling techniques, and rich and agile colors. The artist jests: There's nothing on my canvas. Indeed, if one were to describe the images of Ada using interpretive methods, it could be summed up in one phrase. The "emptiness" of the image, as the object, focuses more on the meaning behind the painting: abandoning concepts and responses, giving up images and laboring, attaining a natural state effortlessly, and writing one's imprint with ease.

Replacing the textual system of "extension and connotation" with "no distinction between inside and outside" is more accurate. MA Kelu completely moved away from the previous research on any painting system, shifting from exploring specific painting languages to expressing his internal state and spiritual world. In this sense, the "emptiness" of the image corresponds to the richness of his life experiences.

Looking back on the eight-year Ada series and its extensions, MA Kelu reconditely integrates his past creative experiences into a personal biography. The natural state in Ada is consistent with his outdoor sketching in the early 1970s in an impressionistic manner. As a member of the art group "No Name", an initial avant-garde art group transiting from China's modern art to contemporary art, he still maintains a sketching approach. In the Ada series, MA Kelu boldly abandoned the pursuit of visual effects on abstract painting, but this abandonment of the abstract language system stems from his systematic research on abstract painting theory since the 1980s and the gradual and progressive approach to creation he has deeply comprehended over the years. Over the past forty years, he has experienced surges of trends such as American abstract expressionism, reflections on Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, and intellectual identity on the international stage. Through the Ada series, one can also glimpse the artist's decades of calligraphy study, with the muscle memory by copying hundreds of volumes of Wen Fu, becoming another fulcrum behind the "emptiness" of the painting. His understanding of Chinese culture and pursuit of a transcendent realm ultimately allow MA Kelu, to act as he pleases without overstepping boundaries.

The significance of the Ada series from 2016 to 2024 lies in an artist who has been creating for half a century, breaking away from established rules of the game, leaving behind the signified of iconography, the standards of composition, the textures of painting, the interests of form, and other standards, and with a relaxed and determined mindset along his path, using the most basic elements to paint his rich personal portrait.

Since Ada, abandoned techniques, seeking the Tao, raising a toast to the wind.