Ma Liuming. Performances Paintings Sculptures.

In that now crowded planet called Chinese art Ma Liuming is indubitably one of the leading personalities and this monograph the first one dedicated to him documents his activities along an itinerary that began in the early 90s. Naked, with long hair and his face gaudily made-up, the artist soon found his artistic cipher in a male body with a feminine face, a peculiarity that gave rise to Fen-Ma Liuming, the hermaphrodite character that he has constantly played throughout his career. Setting out from a powerful male-female dualism which Ma Liuming has evidently drawn from the androgynous Buddhist statues, from the onnagata and above all from the principle of Yin and Yang this book edited by Eleonora Battiston traces the not always easy years from his first performances in the East Village of a politically agitated Beijing to the most recent paintings and sculptures in which the artist deconstructs and reinterprets his own image with an almost obsessive seriality.