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| Biography
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Ming-Yuen
S. Ma was born in Buffalo, New York, and was raised in Hong Kong. He was
educated at Columbia University and California Institute of the Arts. Ma
has been making experimental videos for more than 15 years. His videotapes
Sniff (1997), Slanted
Vision (1995), Toc Storee
(1992), and Aura (1991) have screened
national and internationally. Ma's recent projects include the multimedia
Xin Lu Project, including the four
videos: [os] (2007), Movements
East—West (2003), Mother/Land
(2000), and Myth(s) of Creation (1997),
which use personal and family history to explore the shifting identities
of peoples in movement - as tourist, traveler, immigrant, refugee, exile.
[os], the most recently completed video in the series, excavates
the personal and the collective, the colonial and the transnational, the
traumatic, the wistful, the queer, and the spectral to tell intersecting
stories about our desires to return to the past. Its title represents
the etymological ‘"ghost’" that haunts the creation
of the word "nostalgia", which combines the Greek word nostos
(return home) and New Latin algia (akin to Greek neisthai
to return). In the summer of 2006, Ma conceived and organized the ReCut Project, a weekly live art series that presented eight contemporary interpretations of Yoko Ono's Cut Piece (1964). The ReCut Project was a part of the exhibition Draw a Line and Follow It at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Other recent hybrid media projects include THIS IS NOT A FOREIGN FILM (2002) an 18-hour installation and performance, based on Pasolini's notorious film SALO, created for Platinum Oasis, an art/performance event curated by Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis, and held at the notorious Coral Sands Motel in Hollywood; Untitled: Video Self Portraits (2002), a collaboration between Ma and his students at Pitzer College with artists Amitis Motevalli and Dorit Cypis' Kulture Klub LA, created for the exhibition Democracy When!? Activist Strategizing in Los Angeles. Ma has received grants from Art Matters, Inc., Brody Arts Fund, California Digital Arts Workshop, Durfee Foundation, Long Beach Museum of Art, WESTAF/NEA, and others. Ma's critical writing and text-based art has been included in many anthologies and journals, and his work has been written about by critics and theorists including Laura Marks, (The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 2000) Roger Garcia, (Out of the Shadows: Asians in American Cinema, 2001) Bérénice Reynaud, (Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, 1996) Holly Willis, and Gina Marchetti. Most recently, Asian American scholars Peter Feng and Xiaojing Zhou wrote about the Xin Lu Project for separate forthcoming publications. Ma’s own recent publications include Untitled (Dear Ma Liuming), in X-TRA (Winter 2006), Untitled (Dear Mr. Rocha) in Release Print (November 2005), A Conversation About Women, Gay Men, and AIDS, (with Richard Fung) in Corpus (Spring 2006). He contributed an essay, The Voice of Blindness: On the Sound Tactics of Tran T. Kim-Trang's Blindness Series, for the book More Than Meets the Eye: Critical Essays on Tran T. Kim-Trang's Blindness Series (forthcoming). He was also interviewed for the documentary Dragon Ladies and Kung-Fu Masters: Reconstructing Asian American Sexuality (sexTV), and the ACT UP Oral History Project. As an arts administrator, Ma has directed the LA Freewaves Festival of Independent Video and New Media (1998), coordinated UCLA's Electric Shadows: A Pan-Asian Film Festival (1997), and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (1995/6). As an independent curator, Ma has organized numerous media arts programs for venues including Artists' Television Access, MIX/NYC, CalArts, San Francisco Asian American Film Showcase, and Los Angeles Festival. He has served on grant panels for organizations including the Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Durfee Foundation, American Film Institute, Visual Communications' Armed with A Camera Fellowship, and City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. Ma has served on the boards of directors for Foundation for Art Resources, Inc. (FAR) and Highways Performance Space. He is currently a member of LACE’s Artist Advisory Board (LAB). Ma is an Associate Professor in Media Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA.
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