17 Jan 2008 to 21 Feb 2008
11-6 Tuesday-Saturday
Reception: January 17th 6-8 pm
798 Avant Gallery
511 W 25th St
Suite 502
10001
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: 212.216.9018
m: 646.460.5136
f: 212.807.8268
w: www.798avantgallery.com
798 Avant Gallery is proud to showcase The Depth of Desire, a solo exhibition by the renowned Chinese artist Ma Dong Min. This will be the artist’s debut exhibition in New York City. The Depth of Desire is a progressive series of conceptual paintings that bring together the artist’s admiration for the patient tradition of Chinese landscape painting with the exuberant stimulation of sexual intercourse.
Ma Dong Min was born in the city of Daqing in the northeastern Province of Heilongjiang in 1968. At that time Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution was two years into effect and the city of Daqing lead the country in industrial growth and output. At the end of the Cultural Revolution Ma Dong Min was able to embrace his artistic ambitions and in 1990 he graduated from China’s Central College of Fine Arts. Since then his works have been widely exhibited in Asia as well as in traveling exhibitions across Europe.
In Ma Dong Min’s continuing series of paintings he explores The Depth of Desire by fusing the ancient tradition of Chinese landscape painting with the instantaneous moment of orgasmic euphoria. The craggy peaks of the mountaintops just break above the bottom edge of the canvas and the sky looms large consuming the landscape. Women appear as ethereal beauties frozen on the brink of sexual climax, their faces and bodies floating amidst the clouds. The fusion of themes reflects Ma Dong Min’s two-pronged approach to grasping The Depth of Desire. The seriousness of the landscape painting echoes the efforts of Chinese scholars to attain a sense of spiritual purity by abstaining from carnal pleasure while studying nature. Yet the skies, filled with women at the peak of sexual experience, seem to suggest that bodily transcendence may also be attainable in the climactic moments of intercourse. The same thing that creates the distinction between the spirit and flesh becomes the very thing that unifies them: the pursuit of desire and our will to seek its depths.
