The 2012 spring sale of Christie's Hong Kong features a collection of artworks by Ma Desheng, carefully singled out from many pieces he produced in different mediums throughout the various stages of his creative endeavor from the past thirty years. It is a collection of works that resonate deeply with each other and which show the evolution of process in Ma's in the long course of his career. Ma has been an active member of the Chinese contemporary art scene from the early 1980s. He was one of the harbingers of the Chinese avant-garde art: the Stars Art Exhibition in Beijing, where he organized, along with 22 fellow artists in 1979 - an unconventional array of individualized styles of art. Untitled, a woodblock print created in 1980, is illustrative of his art in the early phase. It thematizes ordinary living experience - a typical expression of woodblock prints during that period (Lot 2606)- but with sharply etched lines and a simple design of black-and-white, which give the work a cold, distant tone. The Centre Pompidou in Paris once exhibited his woodblock prints, and some were collected by the museum as well. The political atmosphere in China, however, turned grim after the Stars Art Exhibition, driving Ma to focus his art on ink-wash and abstraction. Freedom in Nature (Lot 2411) and Untitled i(Lot 2412) are two representatives of such a style. In Freedom in Nature, the shape of the figure is delineated with expressive, liberal lines; the plump buttock and heavy breast, the small head and large body, and the writhing gesture of became the idiosyncratic human image of Ma. Abstract, and powerful as an expressionist representation, it foretells his later drawings of stone figurines. The canvas is coated by a layer of paint textured like snowflakes, which looks lithographic and in tune with the textural touch of Chinese landscapes. Untitled, on the other hand, is a more atypical work of the artist. It is strongly evocative of orientalism: the Eastern worldview of a round heaven and square earth, the withered trees and rocks and the stylish writhing image of man that are very much the artistic icons of Ma's favourite Bada Shanren, and the bleak, desolate ambience common to traditional Chinese art. To remold the disposition and tenor of traditional art in a contemporary context has since become the aspiration of Ma.

In 2002 Ma Desheng embarked on another seminal series - the cobble-figurine paintings. The artist creates a weird human form by piling up stone shapes, affording his work an extremely abstract and symbolic style. Pillar of the Earth (Lot 2410) is a shining example. The black-and-white cobbled stones allude to his earlier woodblock prints and ink-wash paintings, winding up Ma's life-long pursuit of ink aesthetics. The stones, depicted in a coarse, bold and muscular brushwork, put on the weightiness of sculpture and trigger emotional response and, though simple and artless, they exemplify the masterly use of expressionist colors. Behind such forceful brushwork is the essence of the Chinese free-style, ink-wash art - a gesture so liberal that it resembles Zhang Xu's cursive script. Western media, under Ma's treatment, is instilled with the airy complexion of oriental art, and while Ma accedes to the path of syncretizing Western and Eastern aesthetics cultivated by artists like Sanyu, Zao Wou-ki and Chu Teh-Chun, he contrives a style all his own. Piled one on top of another, the large and small forms seems to depend on each other in face of every possibility of a fall. Set against the three partitions of the brownish background and the obscure slanting division lines, they exhibit a most lively pulsation subject to infinite rhythmic changes. This is the characteristic of this series, and has embodied the reflection and experience of the artist on the nature of the world. For Ma, stone is a metaphor of the earth's nature and the world's spirit: "I think stone exists at the birth of Earth. Soil and stone - there is life in a stone, and everything on Earth can be taken as such a lifeK The spirit of the stone has been influential for the development of the universe, of the world, and of life itself." Even erosion cannot change the substance of a stone. It stands for boundless patience, perseverance and faith. In Pillar of the Earth, the brushstroke, the simple monochromatic coloring, the vast visionary space and the symbolic meaning of the stones combine to spark off a dynamic momentum, a vigorous breath of life that brings us back to remote antiquity. We are driven to re-experience the universe, nature and the primitive state of being at the dawn of Earth. This is the gist of Pillar of the Earth, and it is for this that the work epitomizes that of abstract symbolic art in contemporary China.