Born in the 1980s, Ma is a member of what is considered to be China’s lucky generation. Educated in a time of expansion and development, she is one of the only-children upon whom all their parents’ have been focused. In which lies the problem. In her video From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili, Ma holds the razor blade hidden on her tongue and tells us a story of a life of excessive expectation and discipline. The presence of the blade gives a hesitance and halting quality to her story. It is only at the end of the video that it is revealed with what difficulty she has told it as she takes the razor blade from her mouth.

Ma tells a story of a girl, who, discovered to have a talent for drawing at an early age, becomes the focus of her parent’s ambition. They conceive the idea that she should become a successful artist and all their efforts are directed to that goal. Finally they decide she should go abroad to study, which she does, only to find when she comes home that “after a year away my mother had begun to be old.”

Ma says her story is not just about her, but about many in her generation who bear the burden of their parents’ expectations. ……Ma tells me she is uncomfortable with the speed of change in her native city of Beijing, which she believes makes people change too fast also. Her works seek to memorialize intimate moments, and some like Intimacy require us to slow down if we are to see them at all. As life rushes past, she asks calmly for our attention.

(Madeleine O’Dea, What Lies Beneath, 2009[Excerpt])