Penglong Ma

Biography

Penglong Ma is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, and painting. Born in Shanghai and living between China and the United States, Ma’s practice reflects a sensitivity to the emotional and structural tensions produced by contemporary life—particularly the ways technology, labor, and distance reshape perception. He works with found materials, technological remnants, and bodily forms to explore how vulnerability, pressure, and memory become embedded in objects and environments.

Ma holds a BFA from Suffolk University and is currently pursuing an MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston. His work has been exhibited in the United States and China, including gallery projects, group exhibitions, and collaborative installations. Through materially driven research and poetically charged forms, Ma continues to investigate how individuals navigate the invisible architectures that govern modern experience.

Artist Statement

My practice begins with a desire to understand how the body quietly negotiates the weight of contemporary life—how emotion, memory, and attention are shaped by systems that move faster than we can feel. Living between China and the United States, I have learned to sense the world through shifting cultural rhythms, fractured forms of communication, and the subtle exhaustion beneath everyday structures. I work with materials that bear traces of pressure and use, allowing them to speak as witnesses rather than objects. By merging bodily forms with technological remnants and discarded fragments, my sculptures become sites where vulnerability and tension coexist, where the residues of distance, longing, and labor settle into shape. Through these fragile configurations, I hope to create a space where viewers can feel what is often overlooked—the quiet tremors that reveal how deeply we are shaped, stretched, and held by the invisible architectures of modernity.

Website: www.mapenlong.com

Instagram: @pl.malone