Arts Thread

Coco Ma is a New York-based Chinese artist working in mixed-media installation, sculpture, and mark-making. She builds her work from daily debris, such as branches, Chinese herbal medicine, toilet paper, and cosmetic and food packaging, the small residue of routine. In her hands these materials anchor larger bodily and architectural forms, carrying personal history much the way emotion settles into the female body. Across surfaces she paints, carves, and transfers marks, stretching familiar associations and unsettling habitual ways of seeing. The work grows from the distance between her childhood in Beijing and her adult life in New York. Rather than resolving the gap between these two lives, she lets her materials hold it. Her current research focuses on ancient Chinese architecture, drawing on structural elements such as the wooden threshold, door lintel, Bixi stele, and caisson ceiling. These are forms that organize space and mark the passage between inside and outside, one world and another. In her recent sculptures these references become bodily and spatial, carrying the same sense of crossing that runs through a life lived between two cultures. Ma holds an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College (2026) and a BA in Studio Art and Philosophy from Bard College (2020).