Located on leafy Schüttelstrasse, which runs parallel to the Danube Canal in Vienna’s second district, is the studio of Chinese-born artist Ma Jia. Marked only by the word “Eingang” (entrance) and situated on the ground floor of a 19th-century residential building, the studio’s unassuming exterior offers an ideal foil to the elegant surrounding Gründerzeit architecture. Step across the threshold, however, and visitors are greeted by a bricolage of rusted metal parts, hand tools, sketches, canvases, metal bars, ladders, and 3D art models, providing tantalizing clues into the nature of the work being created—and all just beyond the notice of the building’s many residents, who go about their daily lives largely unaware of this vibrant artistic world in situ.

For over a decade, Ma has lived and worked in the Austrian capital, having moved here in 2011 to further her studies and training at the Academy of Fine Arts. And since 2019 she has been prolific, participating in at least 35 shows, almost all in Austria. She initially pursued her passion for painting by enrolling at the Art School of China Art Academy in Hangzhou before relocating to Beijing as a student of the Central Academy of Fine Art. After completing her studies, she stayed in Beijing for ten years, drawn by the city’s booming, experimental art scene of the early 2000s, although the area where she had two separate studios has since been emptied of its creative denizens in favor of commercial and residential real-estate development.