Ma Ke reexamines his recurring motif of the rider, who symbolizes the free individual for him and in whom he recognizes the image of Dionysus. Conversely, the rider is untethered, even capable of overcoming gravity. The rider figure is regularly featured in Tang poetry, where he is portrayed in moments of return or departure. Romantic landscapes steeped in the light of dusk and reflective surfaces of various bodies of water, sketched in a poetically reduced language, serve as backdrops in these early poems. Against these backgrounds, the rider is described in situations in which he effectively ascends to the heavens and is absorbed by them. In the beginning, his work was informed by traditional Chinese oil paintings and socialist realism, until he developed a wholly new way of perceiving at the Art Academy of Tianjin, liberated himself from restrictions, and found his way to his own artistic language.
