[1] He first rose to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a member of a circle of largely self-taught, underground artists based in Beijing, who worked in direct contravention of the Chinese government's official sponsorship of Socialist Realism.
After the crackdown against Avant-garde artists during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in 1986, he began to show his paintings in the galleries of Berlin, New York, Boston, London, and Vancouver.
In 2006, Kelu's work was featured in Beijing, curated by internationally renowned Chinese art historian and critic, Gao Minglu.
[2] Ma Kelu is an artist who "has always kept away from the mainstream and has never compromised, whether at home or abroad," said painter and critic Chen Danqing.
[3] Due to an unfortunate occurrence during Kelu's early years, he never received formal painting classes and was unable to afford proper drawing materials.
Kelu was not able to find huge success by selling his abstract art and so he relied on some old paintings of his that he had brought along with him during his travel to the States.
First, he found his fortune selling old paintings tough but gradually the situation improved and more and more people started asking Kelu for the originals.
Kelu did not want to part ways with his paintings until one day when an elderly American couple insisted on buying his original works.
In 2006, Kelu moved back to China to provide a better living environment for his son, a young artist, and musician who was suffering from depression.
While he began, like the other members of the No Name Group, to paint in the post-Impressionist style that was outlawed in China during the Cultural Revolution, his later work tends towards minimalism and abstraction.
He has also painted a recent series of large-scale landscapes in the classical Chinese style, which is then glazed over with a thick layer of wax to create an ethereal and distorted effect.
[citation needed] A large proportion of their paintings are landscapes made in and out of Beijing, depicting mountains and water, flowers and trees, sunshine, and moonlight.
The Wuming group was exploring humanity, searching for qualities of compassion, empathy, and dignity in images of friends, neighbors, and strangers.
Paintings within each volume are centered on the Wuming period while stretching throughout the artist's career, thereby allowing the study of both group and individual development.
Since a lot of work was created outdoors, Ma Kelu became extremely sensitive to the divisions of day and night and the changing season.
When he was young, he completed hundreds of paintings and these works brought him the strength and happiness to resist against the deadening political atmosphere.
In the early 1970s, Ma Kelu and Wuming began painting from nature, haunting the streets of Beijing and Diaoyutai.