In the course of the conversation, we got closer to the relationship between the artist's personal experience and his creation. The "Journey to the West Series" is Ma Ke's "rewriting" of the traditional Chinese novel "Journey to the West", which responds to the long interaction between East and West in the great history, and becomes a reflection of Ma Ke's personal experience. 

Inspired by his father's art in the 80's, influenced by the Su School in Tianjin in the 90's, impressed by the primitive rhythm of life when he was teaching in Africa, and returning to China in 2000, Ma Ke spent five years travelling to Chinese monuments and gained a first-hand experience of traditional culture. And this echoes what the artist says, "The bigger the world you enter, the more concrete you become".

Professor Wang Min'an also shared his feelings about the exhibition, which is the first time that he has systematically viewed the whole picture of Ma Ke's thirty-year creative journey. Regarding the degree of participation of different styles and coordinate systems in Ma Ke's creation, Professor Wang Min'an said, "It is very difficult for an artist to stay outside the tradition of painting, and every genre lives in the body of the artist. For Ma Ke's creations, besides the distinctive shadow of Cubism, there are also the colours of Surrealism, and the charm of this kind of painting lies in the drama composed of the conflict and turbulence between the various elements of the painting, and all of Ma Ke's paintings have the feeling of a dream world, a kind of unreality, and some of the unreality doesn't lead to the dream world, whereas Ma Ke's unreality leads to the dream world".