Jennifer Wen Ma: Gardens of Resilience

Concurrent to An Inward Sea, the New Britain Museum of American Art is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by Jennifer Wen Ma at the Delamar West Hartford. 

Opening in mid-June, the installation will include a series of special edition prints on silk entitled In the Dark and Light of Cry Joy Park, 2019. Evoking banners or hanging tapestries, the works depict sculptural landscapes that the artist created using her signature laser-cut paper structures, like those featured in An Inward Sea. This series of prints follows a rich tradition of Chinese literati landscape painting, borrowing compositional structures from old masterpieces of the Northern Song Dynasty (AD 960-1127), such as Travelers Among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan, and Early Spring by Guo Xi.

The installation also highlights a limited-edition series of photographic prints of Ma’s inked-plant works, including Sprout, In Furious Bloom III, and Germinating Thoughts, all 2016. These evocative photographs stem from the artist’s practice of applying Chinese ink-- the main medium for expression and communication in East Asia for centuries-- to live plants and landscape; and observing the growth of new greenery from within the black, to give evidence of perseverance and resilience of life. This traversing of art historical language is indicative of the artist’s longstanding interest in placing traditional aesthetic practices into contemporary discourse through her signature visual language.