BIOGRAPHY

Penglong Ma is a Chinese artist based in Boston whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation, investigating the relationship between perception, materiality, and power. Educated in both China and the United States, Ma works through a trans-cultural lens that allows him to perceive systems—political, technological, and economic—not as abstract structures, but as sensory experiences that inscribe themselves onto the body and the object.

At the center of his practice is an inquiry into how the visible world mediates the invisible forces that organize contemporary life. His work begins with fragments of the everyday—discarded technologies, industrial materials, domestic residues—and transforms them into sites of perceptual negotiation. These materials, once tools of efficiency and consumption, are reconfigured into quiet monuments that reveal how control operates through beauty, and how disappearance becomes a condition of seeing.

For Ma, perception is never neutral; it is shaped by labor, ideology, and memory. His works invite viewers into moments of instability—where order collapses into emotion, and silence vibrates with tension. Through his use of repetition, corrosion, and symbolic stillness, Ma constructs what might be called a phenomenology of erosion: a way of feeling time through the surface of things. The technological relics and architectural fragments in his sculptures do not simply represent decay, but embody the psychological residue of modern acceleration—the exhaustion of systems that promise progress while perpetuating absence.

Rooted in cross-cultural dissonance, Ma’s artistic language oscillates between intimacy and distance, reality and simulation. His practice can be understood as an archaeology of perception: tracing how value, faith, and desire circulate through material, and how the body becomes a site where history sediments. In his work, to perceive is to listen—to the faint hum of systems, to the weight of silence, to the subtle vibration of what is almost gone.

CV

Education

  • MFA in Studio Art, School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston, MA 2026

  • BFA in Fine Arts, Suffolk University, Boston, MA, 2024

  • Secondary Education in Visual Arts, Shanghai, China

Solo Exhibitions

  • The Distance Between Silence, Independent Solo Exhibition, Boston, MA, USA, 2025
    (Exploring perception, communication, and emotional distance through sculptural and sound-based installations.)

  • Bodies of Faith, Solo Exhibition, Powerlong Art Center, Hangzhou, China, 2024
    (Sculptural installations reflecting on ritual, colonial influence, and the aesthetics of devotion in contemporary culture.)

  • Dust Memory, Solo Exhibition, M50 Art District, Shanghai, China, 2023
    (Mixed-media works addressing material decay, urban transformation, and the fragility of labor and identity.)

Group Exhibitions

  • Show Your Narrative, Graduate Group Exhibition, Tufts University, Boston, MA, 2025

  • It Follow Me Home, Group Exhibition, Gallery 263, Cambridge, MA, 2025

  • Paused Time, BFA Graduation Exhibition, Suffolk University Gallery, Boston, MA, 2024

  • Graduate Year One Exhibition, SMFA at Tufts University, Boston, MA, 2025

  • Material Intervals, Student Sculpture Exhibition, SMFA at Tufts University, Boston, MA, 2025

  • Reassembled Realities, Emerging Artists Exhibition, Nave Gallery, Somerville, MA, 2024

  • Under the Same Light, International Student Exhibition, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2023

  • Between Fragments, Contemporary Sculpture Group Exhibition, West Bund Art Space, Shanghai, China, 2022

  • Echoes of the Ordinary, Young Artists Invitational, Powerlong Art Center, Hangzhou, China, 2021

Residencies and Awards

  • Experimental Sculpture Award, Today Art Museum Youth Program, Beijing, China, 2025

  • Tufts Dental Clinic Installation Project, Tufts University, Boston, MA, 2024

  • Huashan 1914 Creative Park Artist Residency, Taipei, Taiwan, 2024

  • Contemporary Material Innovation Prize, Jiaxing Cultural Art Foundation, Jiaxing, China, 2024

  • “City Texture” Sculpture Award, Xiamen Art Week, Xiamen, China, 2024

  • Emerging Artist Grant, Shanghai Fine Arts Association, Shanghai, China, 2023

  • Outstanding Studio Practice Award, Suffolk University, Boston, MA, 2023

  • Young Artist Prize, Hangzhou International Art Fair, Hangzhou, China, 2022

  • “Material Language” Jury Prize, Shenzhen New Wave Art Exhibition, Shenzhen, China, 2020

Publications and Press

  • The Weight of Silence: On Penglong Ma’s Sculptural Language,” Art Research Journal, Shanghai, 2025.

  • Christopher, “Psychopathology and Life,” Routledge Press, 2024.

  • “The Weight of Silence: On Penglong Ma’s Sculptural Language,” Art Research Journal, Shanghai, 2024.

  • Post-Industrial Bodies: The New Sensibility of Material,” Hi艺术 (Hi Art Magazine), Shanghai, 2024

  • “Material as Memory: Penglong Ma’s Works,” Artforum China (online), 2023