About

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Xiaoxiao Ma | 马萧萧

b. 1998, China. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Her work is shaped by a trajectory through China, the Levant, North Africa, and the United States. These are landscapes where faith and political force architect daily life. In these regions, migration and displacement are ordinary facts. Her practice follows how this history registers in the body: in posture, repetition, and the labor of belief. It follows too what it does to the interior: to the forms of desire and grief that survive inside conditions that do not permit them.

Working across painting, sculpture, and animation, Xiaoxiao treats form as a consequence of inquiry. Earlier work moved through mythological and psychological registers: bodies in metamorphosis, figures caught between states, and the specific distortions produced when the self is required to be something it cannot be. Recent work turns toward gesture, notation, and historical trace. Language and numbers carry memory without illustration. Words are material. Repetition and inscription operate as physical pressure rather than explanation.

Ambiguity is a structural necessity. A raised hand operates simultaneously as prayer and political oath. Text appears in paintings but resists fixed interpretation. This illegibility is not obscurity, but a refusal of clarity when clarity is a demand of power. The work does not resolve these tensions; it renders them visible.

Materials are placed in deliberate opposition: rigidity and fragility, accumulation and erosion. These pairings generate pressure through surface and structure. Materials fold, cling, and persist, holding traces of time, force, and absence. They are chosen for their capacity to fail.

The work attends to what cannot be spoken directly: how lives are shaped by contradictory systems, how certain positions remain active even when they are forbidden, and how much is carried, collectively and quietly, by those who have learned to exist inside that contradiction. It does not locate resistance in the individual subject, but makes visible the violence required to maintain coherence against forces that continually complicate it.

Alongside her visual practice, she maintains a parallel discipline in music, trained in classical piano from childhood. Her work involves improvisation, scoring, and electroacoustic forms, with a focus on analog synthesis and the rhythmic mechanics of the piano. Both practices share a sustained attention to texture, pattern, and what persists when a form begins to strain.

She holds dual BFAs in Experimental Animation and Music Composition from the California Institute of the Arts.

CV

Available Upon Request

Contact

studio@xiaoxiaoma.com

XIAOXIAO MA