Jennifer Wen Ma
visual artist working and living in New York and Beijing
Jennifer Wen Ma (Chinese: 马文 1973, Beijing, China) is a visual artist working and living in New York and Beijing. Ma's interdisciplinary practice bridges varied media such as installation, drawing, video, public art, design, performance, and theatre.
Early life
Ma was born in Beijing China, in 1973. After moving from Beijing to Oklahoma, Ma started drawing and painting as an alternative to literature, from which she felt alienated having to speak a second language. Ma received a Bachelor of Arts degree in advertising design from Oklahoma Christian University of Science and Arts. In 1999, she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Pratt Institute in New York.
Career
Post graduation, she worked for eight years as the studio director for artist Cai Guo-Qiang.
Early works
Ma's initial practical training in advertising fostered in her "a production and design aesthetic … in the sense that she is responsive to the qualities and needs of materials as well as to the demands of place and public," while remaining critical of market and client. In 2001, Ma fought with another female Asian artist/designer in the live-wrestling performance Crouching Bitch at Deitch Projects. The combat signified the competition between Ma's own short-lived Dodorama fashion label and her co-combatant's, mocking the concurrent New York Fashion Week where downtown designers rivaled to be the "best."
The iconoclastic dimension of Crouching Bitch continued in installations such as Wash Hands, made in Beijing in 2003, and Project Change World: City of Yan'an in 2006, but within a more social and political context.
“Jennifer Wen Ma” enters the record as visual artist working and living in New York and Beijing. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jennifer, visual and artist can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23303202. VIAF identifies the subject as 286928400. The Library of Congress control number is n2013044905. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1999, 2001 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jennifer Wen Ma” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.