Nonfiction. Art. Asian American Studies. Bilingual Edition. Edited with a preface by Lien Chao. This book provides a critical study of the abstract ink painting of the Chinese Canadian artist Peng Ma, who early in his career saw abstraction as an artistic advancement on tradition. Chao's critical approach to Ma's work juxtaposes stimulation and resistance as the ongoing impact of Western abstract painting on contemporary Chinese brush painting. She goes on to investigate how Ma's cross-cultural experience has gradually developed his hybrid aesthetics to embrace Eastern and Western art traditions to create his own distinctive art. Includes 210 reproductions.
Author City: Toronto, ON CAN
Peng Ma studied brush painting and sculpture in China and for many years taught fine art at the Zhejiang Fine Art Institute before immigrating to Canada in 1989. He has exhibited works in China and Canada. In 2002 he was awarded the Excellence Award for his sculpture Mother Love, now permanently installed at the Beijing International Sculpture Park. Many of his paintings apply the brush painting technique to depict Canadian landscape themes. Peng Ma lives in Toronto with his wife.
about the editor:
Lien Chao came from China to Canada in 1984. Her first book, BEYOND SILENCE: CHINESE CANADIAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH, was published in 1997 and won the Gabrielle Roy Award for Canadian Criticism. Her work includes two volumes of bilingual poetry, MAPLES AND THE STREAM and More Than Skin Deep, and a creative memoir, TIGER GIRL (HU NU), and she is the co-editor, with Jim Wong-Chu, of STRIKE THE WOK: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE CANADIAN FICTION. She lives in Toronto.