Jongil Ma 마 종일

BiographyBeing a Brooklyn based artist since 2002 and graduated from SVA in 2002. Between 2005 to 2021, I participated in more than 40 group exhibitions in galleries, community art spaces and in city and university museums, including; The Museum of Art in Seoul National University, The Bronx Museum, Gwangju Museum of Art, David Owsley Museum of Art, Charles Wang Center in Stony Brook University, Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden, and Housatonic Museum of Art in the year 2021. I participated including the 2009 ‘International Incheon Women Artist’s Biennale’ in Korea, and the 2010 Lodz Biennale in Poland. In 2011 Kolon Corporation selected me to create an installations. In 2006 and 2007, I participated in public art projects sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Korea in Gwangju and Damyang. I had two person exhibitions at the Roger Smith Hotel Gallery in Manhattan, Participated in Jamaica Flux: Wrokspaces & Windows at Jamaica Center For Arts & Learning in Queens, and exhibited work as part of LMCC Governors Island Project, all in 2010. In 2008 I won the Emerging Artists Fellowship and exhibited an installation at Socrate Sculpture Park and another award from AHL Foundation, the Korean Art Community in New York City, an exhibition in Gana Art Gallery in the same year. I worked in AIM program in the Bronx Museum of Art then participated in AIM Biennial Exhibition in the Bronx Museum of Art, and included in the Islip Art Museum, And Randall’s Island Park in conjunction with FLOW. 11: Art and Music. More artist award from Hanyang Mart in 2009, received grants from Arts Council in Seoul Korea in 2010 and the Pollack Krasner Foundation for the 2011 and 2012 Fiscal year. My work collection included in Korean Cultural Center in NY, David Owsley Museum of Art, Charles Wang Center and Housatonic Museum of Art. My work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Korea Times, NY Art Magazine, AM New York, Hankyoreh Shinmun , Money Today, and Gazeta Lodz in Poland, World Sculpture News, and White Hot magazine.

Artist StatementSince 2005 I have focused on projecting my on-going conceptual idea of a reflection of the nature of relationships and act of balancing between these, sometimes chaotic or harmonic in other times. I portray the constant conflict between the positive and negative, the weak and powerful, fixed and temporal, and institution and the individual, through an installation of woven strips of wood, both rendered and in their raw, natural forms. The tension and stress in the wood that exists to achieve these graceful and delicate forms, the resemblance of architectural engineering, and the act of drawing three-dimensionally in space and all pay tribute to the constant strain, and movement that occurs in nature to maintain equilibrium. As it is the case of any act of balance in nature, the physicality of my projects are always changing and unique to every space and environment; the number of rendered strips and the specific angles of the twists and turns vary according to the space. However, the general look of the project will be an installation of woven strips of wood, shaping and turning through the space, and carefully expanding and contracting like the living body in the given space. My ideas about what matters most to me as an artist and the best ways to approach them have been steadily changing. For last few years my ideas in art making have been slowly shifting. I have begun to have a journey to inside of myself as far as I can reach to the individual cells or even smaller world of microscopic level, atom, electron or even further if I can and learn from their behavior, their consciousness if they have it. The reason I attempt to have this opportunity is to invest a time period to know myself better or more accurately. I assume understanding further and deeper why I want to create works, what fundamental base I need to stand, and how I access and engage within this society with my proper tool, another word artistic language could possibly help to better relate to the sensitivities and subtle forms of communication of this society.

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