About

Chen Ma (she/her) is an animation director from China. Her practice embraces a wide range of visual experimentations from traditional 2D animation to mixed-media animation. Chen loves to push the boundaries of moving images and transform her own personal experience into content that can resonate with the public. Her animation works in recent years show a great focus on social criticism and psychological exploration through the use of bizarre and surreal storytelling.

Her graduate work at RCA, The Self and The Other was inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, using minimal shapes to test the communication boundary of visual language.

The three characters embrace senses of self built upon the others’ subjectivity. They embody the conflicts inherent in intersubjectivity, where individuals cannot escape the others’ gaze : “….while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me” (Sartre, 1943).

Instagram: @worksofchen

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