Ma Jin (b. 1999, Sichuan Province, China) lives and works in Jingdezhen, China. His practice spans ceramics, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and mixed media, through which he explores the complex relationships between individual experience, social relations, and collective structures.
His work is grounded in observations of relationships between people, between humans and objects, and between individuals and groups. He examines intimacy and estrangement, connection and rupture, as well as the psychological shifts and emotional experiences shaped by changing social conditions. In his ceramic practice, he often employs simplified, primitive-looking human figures to construct situations in which subtle relational dynamics emerge through orientation, distance, gaze, and absence, rather than through explicit narratives or predetermined plots. His photographic practice and subsequent image-based reworking extend these inquiries to questions of representation, reality, and the mechanisms of looking, examining how images construct associations and how viewers form judgments about reality from limited visual information.
His ongoing research centers on Post-Cluster, an inquiry into the ways relationships, memories, and emotions persist and transform following changes in or the dissolution of existing collective structures, and into the possibilities of establishing new connections. Within this framework, relationships serve not only as subjects of observation but also as a conceptual thread connecting different media, individual experiences, and social realities.
Rather than adhering to a single medium or fixed form, Ma develops his practice through material experimentation and the observation of everyday life. He translates elusive psychological states and social relations into tangible material and visual experiences, while continuing to explore how individuals might re-establish connections with others, their surroundings, and the wider world amid changing social structures.