BOUNDED SPACE and DNArt are pleased to launch a solo exhibition by artist Ma Kelu from June 14 to July 14, 2025 ——Ada. As a significant figure in Chinese contemporary art, Ma Kelu's artistic practice spanning over half a century integrates Eastern and Western cultural perspectives, demonstrating a unique creative trajectory and spiritual breakthrough.

Titled after his pivotal series Ada, this exhibition systematically presents works created by the artist between 2016 and 2025 across various stages of this thematic exploration. These works are both independent and closely related, continuing Ma Kelu's consistent spiritual exploration and presenting a more radical attitude in form. The exhibition will also feature specially selected precursor and extended works related to the ADa series.

Ma Kelu was born in Shanghai in 1954 and later moved to Beijing. As a member of the Chinese contemporary art group "Wuming painting group", Ma Kelu has consistently pursued the principle of "art returning to its essence", aiming to achieve complete freedom in his artistic creation. He participated in the underground art exhibition of 1974 and the public exhibition of the Group in 1979. In the early 1980s, he became a member of the Beijing Abstract Art Experiment Group. His early landscape works transcended conventional plein-air painting, embodying distinct artistic propositions, research consciousness, and working methodologies. He resided in New York during his early career, studying at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Ma Kelu returned to his homeland in 2006, continuing his abstractist style with a broader perspective.

The Ada series, initiated in 2016, marks a crucial turning point in Ma Kelu's artistic career. This transformation stemmed from profound introspection following his major forty-year retrospective in 2011. Confronting the accumulated richness of past experiments, complex thoughts, and exploratory paths within his oeuvre, Ma Kelu resolved to embark on a more fundamental change.

Within the Ada series, painting breaks free from the constraints of visual intuition, transforming into material traces and temporal sedimentation. Employing large formats, intense chromatic fields, and restrained manual intervention, the artist challenges viewers' traditional perceptual modes of painting, reconstructing the experience of viewing. The Ada series represents Ma Kelu's radical interrogation of painting's essence. He decisively strips away elements traditionally emphasized—narrative, expression of meaning, and technical display—establishing instead new principles of "meaninglessness", "non-technique" and "no distinction between East and West". This seeks to discard all predetermined labels and return to painting's most primordial origins in search of answers. During creation, Ma Kelu deliberately minimizes the intervention of the "hand", pursuing a state of relaxation and lightness, allowing the painting to emerge as naturally as breath. This approach—akin to "minimal effort achieving maximum effect"—eschews deliberate artifice and overt exertion. Pictorial details are not meticulously designed but arise naturally from the act of painting itself, preserving a profound painterly quality within extreme concision.

Collectively, the works in the Ada series exhibit a unique homogeneity, as if sharing a single cohesive aura. Yet, each individual work simultaneously nurtures an independent character within this unity. Like naturally occurring imprints sharing a common origin yet diverse in form, they ultimately converge towards the pure traces of time and matter naturally flowing and solidifying.