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.