【ArtAsiaPacific Review】马秋莎：远大前程（Ma Qiusha: Great Expectations）

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马秋莎七岁那年，她的父母决定培养她成为一名音乐家。他们买了一架手风琴，给她报了培训班。可惜手风琴对于年幼的马秋莎来说太重了，她不得不放弃音乐，转而学习绘画。上课时，她严厉的母亲会在教室窗户外观察，确认她是否在不断进步。如果她犯了错误，母亲就会进来掐她腿的内侧以示惩戒。

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用功和努力是马秋莎成长期间一直秉承的理念。“我的父母常常跟我提起文化大革命。那时他们根本没有上大学的可能，所以他们现在愿意付出一切，来让我接受他们当初没有机会拥有的大学教育。他们一直告诉我要刻苦努力，并且把一切希望都寄托在我身上。”马秋莎言语中有一丝忧伤。我当时在她位于顺义的工作室里，在距离北京城30公里处的东北角。她的工作室并不大，还有一间专门用于放映影像的侧室，拉着厚厚的门帘。马秋莎34岁，脑后扎着一个略显严肃的马尾辫。她的助手正俯下身仔细调整她最新的作品《你》。这是一个正在进行中的纸上系列作品，开始于2012年，用水彩颜料和拼贴纸相结合的形式刻画出城市建筑景观。马秋莎运用切割成小片的金色和银色贴纸来表现建筑物的窗户，这些亮片能够折射出观看者自己的影子，以此迫使观众直面自我。

你：盾 No.2 | You Shield No.2

纸上水彩及综合材料 | watercolor, digital print & mixed media on paper

150 x 200 cm

2015

马秋莎的母亲倾其所有时间、精力和资源来确保她唯一的女儿能够走上“成功之路”，这使得她们的母女关系一直很紧张。对于马秋莎甚至她母亲而言，幸运的是从她刚开始学画画到之后的许多年间，她的导师一直是宋冬——中国当代最重要的艺术家之一。马秋莎2005年从中央美术学院数字媒体艺术专业毕业之后，花了两年的时间在纽约阿尔弗雷德大学学习电子综合艺术，拿到了艺术硕士学位。在接下来的十年间，马秋莎作为多媒体艺术家创作出各种录像，行为以及装置作品，揭露人与人之间复杂的关系，她也以此被越来越多的人所熟知。其中她的录像作品尤其出名。它们大多为自传体，涉及到记忆、错位以及八零后艺术家如何不得不在孝道和个人自由的拉扯之间取得平衡。

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2007年，马秋莎创作了一个八分钟的单频录像作品《从平渊里4号到天桥北里4号》。在录像中她直面镜头，讲述了她与母亲的关系、她的背景、曲折的成长道路以及她是如何从父母过度苛刻的要求中解放自己的。最后一个镜头，马秋莎从嘴里拿出了她一直含着的刀片，刀片上布满血迹。“我过了很久都没有给我妈妈看这个作品，我知道她会非常难过，”马秋莎说。

从平渊里4号到天桥北里4号 |From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili?

单频录像 | single channel video

7'54''

2007

在这之后她又创作了一系列以中国女性面临的社会压力为主题的录像作品。在2009年创作的《Must be Beauty》中，她躺在床上，悠闲而又疯狂的吃喝各种化妆品瓶子里的液/固体。通过这件作品，她诉说了外界对于女性墨守成规的审美标准带给女性的压力。同年，马秋莎创作出了三频录像《我们》，探索了社会对于情侣形象的约定俗成的定义：她把三对男女用白布包裹在一起，然后让他们分别向远离对方的方向移动，象征着人作为个体冲破社会传统对夫妻的捆绑和限制。马秋莎说：“性别是女性面临的一个巨大阻碍。女性结婚生子后（马秋莎2013年有了自己的女儿）整整一年什么都做不了，只能思考，把灵感记录下来。男性就没有这样的困扰。我在艺术学院时的很多女同学都结婚生子转行了。”

Must be Beauty

单频录像 | single channel video

4'08''

2009

我们 | We

三频录像 | 3-channel video

3'00''

2009

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对马秋莎来说，这些录像是情感的净化器，帮助她远离了父母那一代被文化大革命侵袭的影响，并在这个世界寻找到属于她自己的定位。历史的痕迹已经被封存在文字记录中，对她产生的挥之不去的影响也仅仅来源于父母。如果说《从平渊里4号到天桥北里4号》表达了马秋莎对自我的解放，那么她2011年创作的26分钟长的《我所有的锐气源于你的坚硬》则让她能够自由地探索流离错位的回忆。在片段中，她穿着冰刀被向后拉行在北京的街道上，镜头仅仅拍摄到她的腿和双脚。冰刀由于跟不同的路面摩擦，在粗钝和锋利之间来回转换。“我有时候我必须停下来去重新打磨刀片，”马秋莎说：“最后都磨出火花来了。我走的这条路从我奶奶家到自己家，小时候走过很多遍，再熟悉不过了。现在很多东西都变样了，爷爷也走了。”这段录像描述了马秋莎童年时期往返奶奶家的路程，也暗示了她曲折的成长过程，某种程度上来说也是自传性质的。

我所有的锐气源于你的坚硬 | All My Sharpness Comes From Your Hardness

单频录像 | single channel video

25'29''

2011

2015年初，法国奢侈品牌迪奥委托全世界范围内17名女艺术家思考迪奥和当代艺术的关系并以此为主题进行创作，马秋莎名列其中。

睡美人 | Sleeping Beauty

单频录像 | single channel video

4'44''

2015

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迪奥的邀请让马秋莎得以继续探索童话故事。早在2009年她就创作了录像作品《白雪公主》——一位公主被包裹着困在玻璃音乐盒中。受迪奥的委托创作的录像作品《睡美人》，作为一项与奢侈品牌的合作项目，原本好像很容易变成一个脆弱的，过于甜美的作品，但实际上作品展开了对于生、死、与重生的思考。在录像中，女主角起先被困在冰面之下，之后冰逐渐融化，睡美人和春天的花朵一起重生。“但是成人的世界其实并不是这样的。这些都是幻象，”马秋莎这么说，所以故事接下来往阴暗的方向发展。冰面融化、百花盛开之后，故事中的睡美人最终还是被玻璃纸包裹着，像一个即将被送出的礼物。这段录像镜头唯美，给人美的享受，实质上却是艺术家对女性的悲叹，女性这一群体被男性的对于女性应有的固定审美所禁锢着，在这个仍然由男性占绝对主导地位的社会中被物化，甚至商品化。

至于那台手风琴，马秋莎至今还保留着，并且她也还是觉得太重。当今的中国社会仍然实行计划生育政策，这台手风琴也暗示着中国无节制的镇压式家庭教育带来的后果。马秋莎坚定地说道：“我绝不会逼迫我的女儿学习绘画或者音乐。我不会做一个‘虎妈’。”

Before her seventh birthday, Chinese artist Ma Qiusha’s parents decided that she was going to be a musician. They bought her an accordion and enrolled her at the local music academy. When the accordion proved too heavy for young Ma, however, music was abandoned and replaced with drawing classes. Strict and demanding, Ma’s mother would sit watching through the classroom window to ensure her daughter made good progress. Whenever she made a mistake, her mother would go in and pinch the inside of her legs.

Working hard was the lodestar governing Ma’s formative years. “My parents are always talking about the Cultural Revolution [1966-76]. They had to abandon any ideas of going to university and they tried so hard to give me the opportunities that they never had or missed out on. Our conversations were always about working hard. There were a lot of hopes resting on me,” Ma told me, with a touch of sadness in her voice. I was at the artist’s studio in Shunyi district, 30 kilometers northeast of central Beijing. A moderately sized warehouse, the space has a small, heavily curtained side room for viewing videos. With her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail, the 34 year old watched as her studio assistants, who call her lao shi (“teacher” in Chinese), are bent over tables concentrating on the latest iteration of “You” (2012-), an ongoing series of watercolor-and collage-on-paper works depicting architectonic city scapes. To denote the windows of the structures, the artist applies sheets of gold and silver, the reflective quality of which forces viewers to confront their own thoughts.

Ma’s relationship with her mother, who had poured endless time, energy and resources into achieving “success” for her only child, has always been fractious. Fortunately for Ma – and her mother – her drawing teacher during those early days, and for many years after, was Song Dong, one of the most important Chinese contemporary artists of his own generation. Ma would go on to graduate in 2005 from the nation’s top art school, Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Art, where she studies digital media. She then spent two years at New York’s Alfred University and gained an MFA in electronic integrated art. Over the subsequent decade, the multimedia artist has become known for her video, performance and installation works that investigate complex relationships between people. In particular, the videos, mostly auto biographical, deal with memory, dislocation of artists as to come to terms with the contradictory pull of filial duties and personal freedoms.

In 2007, Ma made the eight-minute single channel video From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeli, in which she talks directly to the camera about her relationship with her mother, her background, her tortuous journey to maturity and of freeing herself from the overbearing parental pressure of having to succeed at any cost. Ma’s moment of emancipation comes in the video’s closing moments when she pulls from her mouth a hitherto unseen and now bloodied razor blade. “For a long time I didn’t show my mother [this work] because I know she would be very sad,” Ma said.

Other videos that explore the social pressure that women experience in China quickly followed. In Must be Beauty (2009), Ma lies on a bed while ingesting a smorgasbord of beauty products in an uncontrolled frenzy – a statement on the pressures to conform to a stereotypical standard of beauty. In the three-channel video We of the same year, Ma explores the social convention of being in a couple: she dresses three pairs of men and women in white fabric shrouds, then silently observes them as they tear themselves free of the binds that holds them together in what is a triumph of individualism over social convention. “Gender is a broad impediment for women. Women get married and have children, and like me [Ma had her own daughter in 2013] they drop out for one whole year and can’t do anything other than have ideas and make notes… Men do not have these kinds of problems. The majority of female artists in these circumstances just get on with something else,” she said.

For Ma, these videos serve as agents of emotional cleansing and offer confirmation of her having defined her own place in the world – light years away from the one inhabited by her parents through the Cultural Revolution. For Ma, the historical event existed only in books and, as a lingering shadow, is cast across her own life solely by her parents’ memories. While From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4Tianqiaobeli demonstrates Ma’s personal liberation from filial obligation, her 26-minute-long video made in 2011, All My sharpness Comes from Your Hardness, allowed her to freely explore displaced memory. The footage shows only Ma’s legs and feet wearing ice skates as she is being dragged backward across a variety of road surfaces in Beijing. The skates go from blunt to razor sharp depending on the road surface. “Sometimes I had to stop and re-sharpen them and, at the end, sparks start flying from the skates. The road is from my grandmother’s to my home. When I was young I walked it many times. I know it well. These days everything has changed so much. Grandma is gone too,” she said. An allegory on the tortuous journey that Ma has traveled since those days of walking to her grandmother’s house, the video is an autobiography of sorts.

In early 2015, the French luxury brand Dior selected Ma to be one of 17 international female artists invited to create works cogitating on how Dior relates to contemporary art. The only stipulation was to include a pair of Dior gloves in her video. The exhibition that followed opened at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in May.

The invitation from Dior allowed Ma to continue an investigation of fairy tales that first started with the 2009 video Snow White, in which the princess is seen trapped within a glass-enclosed musical box. For the Dior commission, Ma produced Sleeping Beauty, a work that could have all too easily become a maudlin and saccharine take on luxury products, but instead is a meditative reflection on life, death and rebirth. In the video, Ma’s heroine is trapped beneath ice, which gradually melts, allowing rebirth among spring flowers. “But the adult world is not like this, really. It is an illusion,” she said, as the story takes a turn for the sinister. As the ice cracks and the season changes, Ma’s Sleeping Beauty is eventually wrapped in cellophane – like a package about to be delivered. While aesthetically sumptuous, the video is a lamentation of women’s enslavement to male perceptions of femininity: they remain objectified – even commodified – in a society that continues to be fiercely patriarchal.

As for the accordion, Ma still has it and it remains too heavy for her to play. These days, it serves instead as a reminder of the excesses of repressive parenting in China’s society where consequences of the country’s one-child policy are still being played out. Ma insisted, “I will not force my own daughter to paint or draw or play music. I will not become a tiger mother.”

（文：Michael Young，写于2015年，英文原文发表于ArtAsiaPacific杂志，2016年5/6月刊，p64-65，感谢实习生倪韵秋对翻译做出的贡献。版权归属ArtAsiaPacific。）

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