Meiling Ma

The work Bitesize can be seen as a reflection on the pandemic situation; Meiling looks closely at everyday utensils in a Chinese household, focusing on the most commonly used blue-and-white ceramic rice bowl. ‘Rice bowl’ in Chinese is Fanwan, which can be interpreted in two ways: the first as the container for the rice, second as the jobs that provide people with a living: if someone loses their job, they will say ‘I lost my rice bowl’.  Meiling sees this very common blue-and-white ceramic rice bowl as a visualisation/materialisation of her own cultural identity.  In the rice bowl series, she intends to respond to the pandemic which raised questions about the environmental problems we are facing as well. At present, our focus in contemporary society is on economic growth, and we take what nature offers us for granted: we have lost the appreciation our ancestors had for the planet as an entity. We live under the illusion that we are wealthy, as we have all manner of resources available to us. Yet, we are truly in poverty because if we do not change our mindset as human beings, the problems in the environment will never truly be solved. People will always be creating fresh problems and trying to address them later. Our greed is in the end what really hurts us. In this work, the rice bowl is gradually bitten away, leaving the bowl without the capacity to contain the rice. Although we should be eating the rice, instead we are eating the bowl away, just like we are damaging the very thing that we need to preserve to sustain our lives. As Jack Ma, a Chinese business magnate, investor, and philanthropist put it: ‘The pandemic has made it clear that mankind cannot live without earth, the earth can live without mankind’. 

Object A is a performance work inspired by Lacan’s Theory of Desire: according to  Lacan, desire can never be fulfilled – sociologically you can get what you need,  psychoanalytically you cannot get what you desire. The phallus as the master signifier  indicates the enjoyment given up as a subject with symbolic identity, our searching for  the phallus will fail due to the fact that the phallus is an imaginary object. We attempt to seek the object to fill phallus-shaped hole, it is a perpetual cycle of pleasure and suffering due to  the fear of our mother abandoning us that is rooted in our unconscious after we are born.  Meiling says that when she was a baby, her mother would chew the food in her mouth and then feed her: the spoon with a mouth represents an imaginary object, performing the primary desire to be fed that is psychologically rooted in us.

Meiling’s video work Another Beginning is a site-specific project in which she records the process of her clay figure melting in a stream in Jingde Zhen, Jiangxi Province, China. In this work, she uses her clay body as the subject to communicate with audiences and they can experience the work in a meditative state. She wants to raise the question of our place in the world: the temporal nature of human flesh. The work is about her body and  materials that are essential to human existence. 

Another Beginning  

by Meiling Ma

Fish jump out of the sea, 

sprinkle sliver grains on the water. 

Wind takes a nap, 

sending songs to search for the next gate. 

A girl with silver hair opens a wooden door. 

The oil lamp fire is dancing, in the end of the darkness. 

Fire kissing the water drops in the air,  

She hears someone says “I am fine” in the far distance. 

She walks towards the lamp fire,  

she could not reach it, 

she wants to grasp it, 

It slips away from her fingers. 

She shouted out,  

but there is no sound. 

She closes her eyes, 

And sank to the bottom of the ocean, 

Water melts her into thousands of grains of sand,  

You will find her in  

A drop of the rain, 

A song of a robin,  

A piece of cloud…