In 2009, the Chinese-American artist Jennifer Wen Ma took over a pottery kiln in Japan’s Niigata prefecture. For her piece “You Can’t Always See Where You Are Going, But Can You See Where You’ve Been?”, she flooded the sloping chambers of the kiln with black ink, and then drenched the surrounding vegetation in the pigment. Since then Ma, who began her career as an oil painter but soon found the discipline of ink wash increasingly attractive, has repeatedly revisited a vision of the world as an ink painting.
Ink is used to fill reflective pools in Ma’s latest installation, “Molar”, which lies at the heart of the Cass Sculpture Foundation’s A Beautiful Disorder exhibition. From the ground up, an inky landscape takes shape: the pitch-black liquid coalesces in wells, whose surfaces acquire a strange, impure sheen as the ink’s mineral-rich content floats to the surface. Even the air takes on the fragrance of the pigment.
Ma places glowing glass orbs in the ink pools, then marks the enclosure with glass panels bearing ink paintings of the surrounding West Sussex countryside. From the ceiling, a tree bursts through, its foliage coated black with ink, sprouting cancerous, crystalline fruit. These 400 hand-blown glass pieces contain teardrop-shaped, sperm-like structures, as well as voluptuous fertility symbols, while others have mutated into malignant cell-like forms. As in traditional Daoist thought, the internal workings of the human body here become a microcosm of the wider natural world.