Jiang Qing
Ma Yanling
马嬿泠
Production date
2008
Object Detail
Media
acrylic on canvas
Measurements
100.5 x 81 cm
Notes
Ma Yanling is best known for her paintings of beautiful women - Hollywood movie stars such as Audrey Hepburn and the ubiquitous Marilyn, and Shanghai divas of the 1930s. Meditations on celebrity and glamour, at their heart lie dark secrets. One of her subjects is Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing, who had been a famous actress in her youth, long before she became Madame Mao and the most hated woman in China as a leader of the ‘Gang of Four’. Jiang Qing was known as Lan Ping (Blue Apple), and joined the anti-Japanese resistance in 1937. She started an affair with Mao while he was still married to the mother of his five children. Another features Ruan Lingyu, a famed movie star of the 1930s. Pursued by the tabloids and with an unravelling private life, she committed suicide at the age of twenty-four, reputedly (although its authenticity is disputed) leaving a suicide note that read, “Gossip is a fearful thing.” Three hundred thousand people followed her coffin through the streets of Shanghai. Ma applies fine brush strokes derived from the eighteen styles of traditional calligraphy over the entire surface of her canvas, creating a net-like grid partially shrouding the features of her subjects. They look through her meticulous brush-strokes as if through a fine curtain, behind which the painful realities of their lives remain obscured. Curator Li Xianting described how her ‘leaf vein’ strokes, knitting and weaving across the canvas, create a “veil of silk.” The painter must hold her breath and draw each line with one sweep of the brush. If even one stroke was flawed it would reduce all her previous labour to nothing. Like the ink paintings of the literati, “Fluent or hesitating, supple or straight, all these strokes represent the artist’s spirit.”
Accession number
2008.058