Ma Yongfeng is an artist, filmmaker, and curator based in Berlin. His practice spans video, film, conceptual art, socially engaged projects, and political art. He seamlessly overlaps and intertwines the roles of artist and curator, initiating a series of award-winning art projects. In recent years, his focus has shifted toward politically charged video and film, site-specific interventions, and situational works. Many of his projects incorporate flexible, guerrilla-style, and immaterial forms of social participation. His politically engaged strategies involve introducing new concepts and methodologies into existing structures through social practices and forms of relational resistance.
myfstudio@gmail.com
Artist, Filmmaker & Curator
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Ma Yongfeng
January 17 - January 25, 2025
Curated by Alessandro Rolandi
Ma Yongfeng is a multimedia and socially engaged artist, as well as a social activist, currently based in Berlin. His practice spans a wide range of mediums, including photography, video, public interventions, and digital media. He is the founder of Forget Art, a decentralized, autonomous collective active in China between 2009 and 2014 and the online community channel Anarchy Hospital. Over the course of our decade-long friendship and artistic collaboration, I have observed how his practice, while constantly evolving and adapting to diverse contexts, has consistently maintained a specific conceptual framework: testing the boundaries of art in terms of usership and its potential to tactically articulate a critical impact on reality and social structures. His work leverages transformative and mimetic processes of emancipation, operating at the intersection of international socio-political and cultural contexts within digital, post-digital, and post-colonial critical frameworks.
His video work, Everything That Rises Must Converge, exemplifies his ability to generate a palpable zone of tension through a gesture that blends spontaneity with performative precision. The transformative power of this work lies in its
material exploration of change—not as a metaphorical or philosophical concept, but as an embodied process induced by autonomous behavior. In the piece, Ma methodically, yet casually, lights twenty boxes arranged in a 4x5 grid on the floor of Organhaus in Chongqing. This act transforms the gallery space into a potentially hazardous environment, one that remains seemingly under control yet charged with latent danger. The action unfolds naturally, evoking a ritualistic quality without adhering to any specific symbolic or ceremonial framework. Ma’s ordinary attire contrasts sharply with the visually striking and destabilizing device he activates, further complicating the viewer’s interpretation of his intentions.
The work begins with a minimalist aesthetic, reminiscent of codified artistic displays, but this order is gradually disrupted by the random sequence of fires. As the flames rise, the quiet severity of the initial arrangement gives way to a dynamic and entropic transformation. Ma’s performance includes moments of hesitation, as he becomes increasingly aware of the danger he has introduced—a danger that is both self-inflicted and beyond his full control. What are we witnessing? A game? A ritual? The ambiguity of the act, carried out with calm detachment, clashes with the intensity of the visual and physical transformation occurring in the space. The heat, the rising flames, and the growing tension challenge the viewer’s perception of the environment and their relationship to it. In an era defined by data-driven control, resurgent authoritarianism, and polarizing forces, what emancipatory spaces and pockets of resistance can artists still carve out through their interventions? Ma’s work does not offer definitive answers but instead deploys a tactical elusiveness to create a present and embodied tension. By maintaining fluidity and resisting direct interpretation, his installation focuses on the visceral experience of energy release through combustion, emphasizing the potential for dangerous yet transformative processes. The title of the work, Everything That Rises Must Converge, further underscores this ambiguity. While the phrase is often associated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit philosopher, and directly referenced in Flannery O’Connor’s novel of the same name, it may also evoke the Yijing (Book of Changes), with its dialectic of opposing forces and cyclical nature. Yet, Ma offers no explicit clues, leaving the interpretation open-ended.
Ma Yongfeng’s performative installation reverberates in the materiality of burning and the tension of the moving image it creates. It serves as both an alert and a warning, embodying the contradiction between its mesmerizing aesthetic and its inherent danger. The work channels a distant yet immediate source of energy—one that can be unleashed but not entirely controlled. In a time when surveillance and control permeate every aspect of daily life, Ma’s piece stands as a potent reminder of the unpredictable and transformative forces that lie just beneath the surface of our structured realities.
Alessandro Rolandi, Bern 17.01.2025
