About the Artist
Rulin Ma is a painter living and working in Seattle, WA.
As a first-generation American immigrant, she draws inspiration from her experiences. Throughout her artworks, she depicts the tensions, contradictions, and confusion of rebuilding a life in a foreign land.
The loss of a familiar language and space forces her to observe life through an outsider's eye. Perhaps out of an instinct to seek security and certainty, she is always conscious of the strangeness in her life and, at the same time, craves familiarity. She constantly collects visual material from her everyday interactions, her environment, and pop culture. She tries to investigate and visualize the connections between them and how they relate to her.
Using layered flat forms and soft geometric shapes to create organic and dynamic compositions, she combines various media, including fabric, screenprint, paint, and found materials, to create playful and colorful works that consolidate graphic, primitive imagery, and abstractions.
Influenced by traditional Chinese painting, she sees the flat picture plane as space where time and perspective can be continuous and rearranged. As she reconstructs her life, she abstracts, breaks, deforms, and reassembles her visual resources to produce an energetic balance between chaos and order, exposure and concealment, joy and fear, as well as triumph and defeat.
CV
Education
2021 BFA, Painting and Drawing, California College of the Arts, CA
Solo Exhibition
2022 Echo, Storefront at Seattle Restored, Seattle, WA
2021 Body Memory, Roll Up Project, Oakland, CA
2019 Ordinary Things, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA
Group Exhibition
2022 Holiday Group Show, Base Camp Studios, Seattle, WA
2022 Turn it Up to Eleven, The Good Arts Building, Seattle, WA
2021 The Contemporary: Globalization in Contemporary Art 2021, VR exhibition
2021 Looking Back, Looking Forward: Art in Response to Covid-19, One Year Later, California College of the Arts Library, San Francisco, CA
2020 The Virgin Forest, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA
2020 Borders and Migration, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA
AWARDS
2020 All-College Honors 2020 Ralls Painting Scholarship, San Francisco, CA
2020 Anderson Ranch Arts Center Scholarship, Snowmass Village, CO