Ma Liuming

He is known most of all for his exploration of the power and poetry of public nudity in China, where such behavior was strictly forbidden.

He graduated from Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in 1991 (MFA) in the Oil Painting Department.

Through different mediums such as performance, painting and photography Ma Liuming continues to investigate the limits of provocation, seducing his audience into considering more intriguing matters.

The initial idea of Fen-Ma Liuming was born in the 1990s when Ma was still an undergraduate in Hubei Academy of Fine Arts.

Although the living condition in the East Village was tough, Ma and his colleagues expressed their passion and creativity to contemporary art during this time period.

But after Ma was released, the expression of the performance became the concern of the life and society, which is the unsafe and dangerous emotion he had at that time.

In a dark performance hall, Fen-Ma Liuming lit matches one by one to illuminate different parts of his body.

Shing-Kwan Chan argues that the performance was staged on a historical site constructed to divide and segregate, which, in a way, symbolically represents the dichotomous gender division of male and female.

The idea of this sleeping version of Fen-Ma Liuming is to blur the boundary between man and woman, self and non-self.

Ma said: I hope Fen-Ma Liuming will remain in a kind of beautiful permanent, ageless state.

In the canvases, Fen-Ma Liuming was portrayed as an infant with big head and fat baby hands.