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Ma Liuming

Great Wall

2004

Digital print

76 × 102 cm

Ed. 7/10

Location: Italy

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About the artwork

In this performance photograph, Ma Liuming walks naked on the snow-covered Great Wall of China, followed by a clothed man. Arms outstretched, the two men seem to be trying to balance themselves on these millennia-old stones. Here, the artist confronts the history of China with the exploration of nudity, expressing the difficulty of living in a conservative society based on censorship.

Expert opinion

This 1998 performance by artist Ma Liuming is the most iconic of his career, making him famous the world over. The artist produced a series of photographs from it, of which this one stands out for its color print. The blurring of the work delicately and poetically conveys the artist's underlying political message. As usual, Ma Liuming explores the limits of provocation, questioning in this symbolic place the censorship of an ultra-conservative Chinese government where all freedom is denied.

About the artist

Chinese artist born in 1969. Lives and works in Beijing (China). A graduate of the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts (China), Ma Liuming founded the Beijing East Village, a colony of artists developing experimental art forms. Although trained as a painter, Ma Liuming is best known for his performances under the guise of Fen Ma Liuming, a hybridization of male and female. In his art, he questions nudity in the Chinese public space and the social restrictions this poses. Poetic and committed, his nude performances led to his incarceration in the 1990s and government censorship. Internationally renowned, Ma Liuming is represented in the collections of the Tate Gallery (London, UK), the Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong) and the Walther Collection (Neu-Ulm, Germany).

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