Ning Ma

Ning Ma is an internationally awarded landscape photographer whose practice engages with place, perception, and the aesthetics of impermanence. Spanning over 30 countries across five continents, her work draws from the visual lineage of shan shui hua (山水画), reframing traditional Chinese landscape principles through the lens of contemporary photographic inquiry.

Within her compositions, the human form is rendered as a peripheral gesture—an ephemeral marker within a vast, often indifferent terrain.

Ning's relationship with the world began at seventeen, when she traveled to Kenya to help build a school in the Masai Mara. Since then, she has studied Arabic in Morocco and Egypt, trekked through the Amazon rainforest, backpacked across Southeast Asia, sailed along Patagonia's jagged coast, floated above Namibia's red sand dunes, cage-dived alongside South Africa's Great Whites, danced beneath Iceland's Northern Lights, and chased supercells through America's Tornado Alley.

Somewhere along the way, she picked up a camera—and never put it down.

Her photographic process is shaped by total physical immersion, including summitting Kilimanjaro, Elbrus, and Aconcagua. These high-altitude encounters inform her methodology: geography is not a passive subject, but an active collaborator.

The resulting images are quiet studies of scale, solitude, and time's persistent gravity.