Ma Ke

Ma Ke was born in 1970 in Zibo, Shandong Province, China. He trained first under his father in traditional Chinese painting and Russian social realism, then studied at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing; no specific degree or graduation date is documented in available sources. He currently lives and works in Beijing, according to his representing gallery, PIFO Gallery.

His practice centers on figurative painting described by his galleries as psychologically charged, often returning to long-running bodies of work such as The Other Shore, which he showed at Platform China in Beijing in 2009 and 2015 and, in a related presentation, at Galerie Rudiger Schottle in Munich in 2012. He has held additional solo exhibitions at PIFO Gallery in Beijing in 2011 and 2018, and appeared in group exhibitions there and elsewhere, including Future Species (2010) and the 2013 China 8: Contemporary Art from China exhibitions across a consortium of German museums. In 2014, a Los Angeles exhibition of his work was the subject of a feature on the Hammer Museum's blog, "Ma Ke in L.A."

Records available to this profile do not document any award, prize, or formal honor for Ma Ke, and no catalogue raisonne of his work could be identified.

Ma Ke's galleries and the institutions that have shown his work describe his paintings in terms of psychologically charged figuration, built around recurring series such as The Other Shore and shown across mainland Chinese venues, PIFO Gallery and Platform China in Beijing, as well as in Europe at Galerie Rudiger Schottle in Munich and, briefly, in a Los Angeles exhibition noted by the Hammer Museum. Curator and writer Karen Smith has described him, in an essay published by ArtCritic, as "the first authentic modernist painter of China," though this is a critical characterization rather than a formal award or prize. The reception summarized here draws primarily on gallery and museum framing, and should be treated as a starting point rather than a settled critical consensus.

Ma Ke's exhibition history runs largely through Chinese and European galleries rather than through the major international auction houses that generate widely reported hammer prices. As of this writing, no single confirmed all-time auction record, meaning a specific work, price, auction house, and sale date, could be verified from primary auction sources. Third-party trackers such as MutualArt report realized prices reaching into the low hundreds of thousands of US dollars for paintings, up to a figure near USD 287,292, and lower figures for works on paper, filed across the name variants Ma Ke, MA Ke, and Ke Ma used by different cataloguers. These aggregate figures should be read as directional rather than as a verified record tied to one specific lot.

Public information on Ma Ke is comparatively thin, and different market databases catalogue him under varying name orders, Ma Ke, MA Ke, and Ke Ma, which complicates any attempt to build a single, reliable auction history. No catalogue raisonne exists, and no permanent museum collection holding could be confirmed from available sources, though his exhibition history with PIFO Gallery, Platform China, and Galerie Rudiger Schottle is well documented. Collectors considering his work should verify individual pieces through his representing gallery and treat any aggregated auction figures with caution until they can be traced to a specific, dated sale.