Lunch Fen-Ma Liuminga I

The artist Ma Liuming was one of the first residents of Beijing East Village, the artists’ colony on the outskirts of Beijing. In the early 1990s, it became a mecca for experimental art, especially performance art. Trained as a painter, Ma graduated from the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts in 1991. He moved to the East Village two years after graduating, where he collaborated with Zhang Huan and Zhu Ming and staged his earliest performances, such as Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch I (1993). To match his own uniquely androgynous appearance, Ma developed his own performance persona: Fen-Ma Liuming, a hybrid figure of male and female components. In Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch 1, he sat, completely nude, sucking a plastic tube that was attached to his penis. During his East Village experience Ma was seeking his own artistic methodology. As he once said: "When I am acting the role, I subsequently become engulfed. The relationship of performance and the artist is akin to two estranged but somehow familiar people of the opposite sex who look closely at one another."

(Su Wei)