Fine Art

Ma Qianchun

I create multidisciplinary works using performance, installation, and found objects to explore the fragile, shifting nature of identity shaped by migration, time, and external forces. My practice often involves ephemeral materials like ice, wax, and carbon paper, that carry traces of transformation and disappearance to materialize the tension between belonging and displacement. Through acts like scrolling a suitcase, burning matches, melting borders, or collecting strands of hair, I translate my personal migration journey into tactile rituals and poetic gestures of resistance against rigid national and cultural categorizations. I question static definitions of self, belonging, and national borders.This is important because in an increasingly divided yet globalized world, identity is both politicized and personal. My work offers a space to reflect, to hold contradiction, and to reimagine how we belong and who decides what that means. 

/ Instagram

Floating island--to Shores Unreached

(performance to camera, results as painting)

The video compiles my total flight duration of about 300 hours from 2018-2024. The recordings of carbon paper traces are left by the interaction of me and my suitcase, as a present for my 18th birthday from my father, on an airline economy-class space sized paper. The airport travel background sound and the excerpt from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet are added in to explore themes of migration, time, and solitude, and to further emphasize a sense of drift and rootlessness of my identity. 

Guess which is the Chinese hair?

(found object installation on wall, interactive piece)

The collection of black hair juxtaposes individual identity (Chinese) with collective identity (Irish) in a A4 frame with a border the size of an opened passport. By presenting the hair in the same frames and inviting viewers to guess its origin, the work deepens discussions on identity stereotypes, blurriness, fluidity, and the social construction of identity. Raised the wish to reach a sense of belonging to be identified with a certain group during migration.