Portrait of a poet

Ma Li, a poet and senior newspaper editor, is showing off her talent for oil painting with a solo exhibition Touch - Ma Li Contemporary Chinese Poets Portrait Exhibition, at the Today Art Museum.

Ma Li at her solo painting exhibition. Provided to China Daily

Ma Li at her solo painting exhibition. Provided to China Daily

In the Contemporary Chinese Poet series, the major part of the exhibition, Ma does portraits of 40 contemporary Chinese poets, such as Ai Qing, Bei Dao and Gu Cheng, thereby profiling the development of contemporary Chinese poetry in a visible way.

"Poetry and painting are like conjoined twins to me," Ma says, meaning she can't separate them.

First noticed as a painter by a curator in 1989, who saw one of Ma's works on her 2-year-old son's T-shirt, she held her first solo exhibition in 1991.

The 51-year-old Ma says she has been painting as long as she has been writing poetry, though the senior editor at Southern Weekly for two decades who has published 10 collections of poems, describes herself as an "amateur".

Artist Chen Danqing, who wrote a preface to Ma's exhibition, only partially agrees with this assessment, saying Ma is so dedicated to painting that "amateur" must be a good thing.

"Ma has made a stylish mental representation of poetry within her paintings," says Li Xianting, an influential art critic and painter, who also wrote a preface for Ma's exhibition.

In the 40 portraits of Chinese poets, that are named after both the poets and their representative works, Ma has mixed realistic figures with abstract elements that appear in the poems.

For example, in the portrait of Shu Ting, who wrote To Oak, Ma has transformed the poetess into a plant. The creative painter also added tiger's whiskers to Niu Han's face, to express the tiger-like features of the poet himself and his works.

"I like the way Ma presents me: colorful plus a little feral, exposing my hidden character, originating from the one quarter Mongolian lineage that she didn't even know of," Niu says.

"Ma's use of color and figure structure reminds me of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo," comments writer Zhang Kangkang. "She has let every poet shine."

Ma says she will continue to work on her Chinese poets series. By 2017 she will finish 100 portraits of 100 Chinese poets, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of China's contemporary poetry.