MA Pai Sui was born in 1909 in Liaoning, China. In 1929, after he graduated from the Art Department of Liaoning Normal College, he worked as an art teacher in Liaoning and Beijing. With the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, he traveled along the Eastern coast at china and painting the landscape that he saw. In 1949, he moved to Taiwan. He taught in the National Taiwan Normal University for 27 years. Since 1975, he has lived and worked in New York, and passed away in 2003 in Florida.
The solid grounding in traditional Chinese ink painting help Ma to enjoy the manipulation of colors and brushstrokes in his paintings. It's worth noting here that Watercolor landscape painting and traditional Chinese ink painting can be seen to share an impressionistic approach. This allows Ma to translate with more ease the main principles of traditional Chinese ink painting into the practice of western watercolor painting, such as a composition structured around the contrast between black and white, or division of the painted surface into three sections. His watercolor paintings are therefore full of the impressionistic charm of Chinese literati Painting, and rich in color and strong feeling. He resorted the methods of the multiple-panel painting to overcome the limitation of the paper size. Besides, In 1957, he edited the Illustrated Guide to Watercolor Painting Technique, which was included in the national curriculum in1971 to be taught at the middle-school level. In 1979, He was awarded the Washington Gold Medal Award of the Sumi-e Society of America Annual Exhibition.
Ma's public collection includes Taipei Fine Art Museum, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; his important international group exhibitions include Brooklyn Museum, New York in 1977 and Lincoln Center in New York in 1980. His important solo exhibitions include Pai Sui Ma at Asia Art Center Taipei in 1992 and 1997, and A retrospective of Ma Pai-Sui at ninety at National Museum of History, Taiwan in 1999. His recent Retrospective exhibition is Journeys with ink and colors ; an exhibition of donated works by Ma Pai-su, organized by Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and Life's footsteps : an exhibition of donated works by professor Ma Pai-Sui organized by National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in 2010.