Yao Ma

She is from China and will graduate in 2026 from the Glasgow School of Art with an MLitt in Contemporary Art Practice. She is an artist whose primary practice is painting. At this stage, her work focuses on the exploration of Chinese painting materials, the human figure, and visual language, while also examining how systems of value and judgement are formed within both society and the art world, and how they shape the way we see, understand, and evaluate things.

She grew up in a region rich in coal resources, where coal mines and their workers formed an important part of her early visual memory. Through depicting miners’ portraits, death, ordinary labourers, and everyday subjects that are often overlooked, she gradually realised that her concern is not only with those who are “unseen,” but with a further question: why are certain people and things considered worthy of attention, while others are naturally placed at the margins? How do naming, categorisation, and social judgement participate in this process?

Her current practice exists between painting, research into visual language, and critical reflection. For her, painting is both a form of expression and a method of experimentation and inquiry. By continuously shifting materials, techniques, and visual structures, she aims to question how established standards are formed, accepted, and challenged, and to search for a visual language that is genuinely her own.