A Feast for the Eyes |
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Faye Hirsch
New York City
Perspective Series
John Micheal Kohler Arts Center
Ming Fay has made a career attending to what is easily overlooked, an impulse that traditionally underlies the genre of still life, his specialty in sculpture. For painters, still life demanded a focus on what was most mundane and present; because of its homely nature, it seemed an arena free of ideological considerations. In the modern era, still- life themes are seized upon for the liberty they see to offer an artist wishing to pursue the most purely formal concerns. According to his own account, the flag gave Jasper Johns an ordinary object with which to begin. But a flag, as many have pointed out, is not so neutral; nor even are paintbrushes, another Johns subject, which arrive as laden with implications about art making in a particular time and place as they do with their own objecthood. Ming Fay is not a Western artist, though he has lived in the United States for 35 years, most of those years in New York When Fay makes a still-life object, as he has for mos of his career, the things he chooses to represent carry symbolic associations particular to his culture. When he makes an orange, for example, he knows it symbolizes good luck; in popular Chinese lore, a peach means longevity and a pear, prosperity. He might choose to make one of those mysterious roots (not just the best known, ginseng) arrayed on trays in Chinatown, whose healing properties even he is ignorant of but which he is certain carry significance beyond their material incarnation. Although there has been a history of still-life painting in China, it was not traditionally the most significant genre; as sculpture, it is rare (as in the West), and at the large scale Fay prefers, nonexistent. Fay wants his objects to carry Chinese symbolic associations, but they just as surely attach themselves to the effect of still life in Western art: they allow the overlooked to appear front and center. Just like Johns' paintbrushes, Fay's oranges and pears are simultaneously self-evident as objects and encodings of more veiled contents, symbolic and historical.
Fay was born in Shanghai in 1943 and raised in Hong Kong, where his family moved after the Communist takeover. His mother was an artist, and his father worked in the burgeoning Hong Kong movie industry. Obsessed with American popular culture throughout his youth, Fay received a scholarship in 1961 to study at the Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, Ohio. Realizing that his interest was in fine art, however, he moved on to the Kansas City Art Institute and to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he received his M.PA. in 1g75. During his years as a student, he was primarily a sculptor, working in monumental welded steel, the predominant material used by American sculptors at the time. In the late 1960s, however; there was a movement against monumental sculpture as Process Art filtered the lessons of Abstract Expressionism through a counter-cultural sensibility. Although he does not mention Process Art as an influence, the movement had seized control of the art world by the time Fay moved to New York in the early 1970s, creating an atmosphere conducive to experimentation in sculpture and installation. When Fay arrived in New York, he was forced to reassess his situation as monumental steel was out of the question for lack of money and studio space. He threw out much of what he had learned about sculpture in graduate school. Living a Spartan existence, he became a vegetarian and began making sculptures out of cheap papier- mâché fitted over light wire armatures and then painted. Fay's papier-mâché not only consists of paper pulp but a variety of materials: gauze, plaster, pigment, and acrylic polymer Although it took Fay a full year to refine his new technique, especially his surface treatment, he had been trained to be a perfectionist, and by the end of that year; he had made a large, realistic-looking pear. Fay has worked in other media in the past 25 years-glass, cast bronze, and ceramics (during, for example, a 1995 residency in the Arts/Industry program of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center(-but he has remained most faithful to the papier-mâché he perfected during his first few years as a poor New York artist. The materials of his youth were permanently abandoned (recently he has begun to weld again, though the technique is applied to delicate forms recalling the papier-mâché works).
His iconography also changed during this early period of reassessment. Along with a rejection of monumental media came a turn to subjects most readily at hand. Big abstractions suddenly seemed to matter very little to the struggling young artist. The pear was the first of many fruits and vegetables that Fay modeled after exemplars he carefully selected in downtown markets. Having perhaps realized his position in the spheres of art and commerce, he transformed it into a strength from the standpoint of his own productivity. He turned to familiar objects as one might to kindred spirits and began to develop a Taoist life philosophy that sees humanity as merely one element in the continuum of nature. This philosophy is expressed in traditional Chinese rice paper drawings in which the sky, mountains, and rivers loom over tiny figures, depicting people as small and insignificant in comparison to the world around them. Fay's oversized fruits and vegetables are a very literal expression of this attitude. They de-center humankind and suggest a more humble relationship to nature. Prom fruit and vegetables, Fay moved on to seeds and pods, all perfect, and thence to imperfect shells, strange roots, and other "natural" materials that, damaged or unfamiliar, began to grow more fantastical. One of Fay's favorite objects, a water pod called ling in Chinese, looks like one of De Kooning's big figural abstractions, though it could not be further removed in its origin. Most recently, Fay's sculpture has become pure fantasy-light-hued, craggy columnar forms that look as though they were extracted from a tropical fish tank. In his studio, the artist keeps trays of neatly ordered, natural materials; the sheer variety of appearance even within a single type of pod or even a tiny detail offers endless inspiration.
Obviously, Fay's relationship to nature is not so simple; "nature" does not necessarily mean "natural." Per one thing, the scale of his sculptures has always been noteworthy; these are objects blown up many times, sometimes as much as 100:1. To enter one of his installations is to be transported into a realm where "normal" relations between people and things no longer prevail. Whether this is a realm tied more to a science-fiction movie set or to a Taoist reconsideration of nature's hierarchies is a determination to be left up to the viewer. Pep associations, pest-Oldenburg, are unavoidable, as are those to Chinese decorative arts, granted more serious artistic consideration in the Best than in the West. It should be remembered, en the other hand, that Fay never makes his sculptures tee large. He says he always has made them so they may easily be carried by one or two people. In a sense, though outlandishly beyond the normal scale of whatever they depict, they are strangely human scale, "natural" companions in size and presence to the viewers who ramble among them. These abnormally large fruits and pods are, in fact, normalized to the proportion of human beings. And although they can be very alienating from the standpoint of recognition, as presences they are completely unthreatening and companionable. In fact, this also is representative of Fay's Chinese background in that it reflects Chinese attitudes toward representations of landscape. The Chinese artist assumes that the beholder is in the landscape, net looking at it from the outside. Thus, by increasing the size of his fruit and vegetable sculptures, Fay mixes Chinese and Western traditions in landscape and still-life painting. Reviewers describing a pair of outsized wish bones in a Ming Fay exhibition almost invariably remarked on the feeling they conveyed of conversing with one another; other commentators have spoken of the "sexual" associations provoked by various Ming Fay fruits. Whose "sex"? Clearly, the reference is not to germination by spores or grafting but to the libidinal associations attending anthropomorphic forms. In his book Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, Norman Bryson writes,
Still life is in a sense the great anti-Albertian genre. What it opposes is the idea of the canvas as a window en the world, leading to a distant view. Although its techniques assume a mastery of perspective.. .nevertheless perspective Is jewel-the vanishing point-is always absent. Instead of plunging vistas, arcades, horizons and the sovereign prospect of the eye, it proposes a much closer space, centred en the body.
Bryson comments specifically en painting, but perhaps it is net inappropriate to see Ming Fay's sculptural still life as a correlation to this principle of corporeal proximity. By choosing this particular scale, Fay has brought the associations to the body inherent in still-life painting to three dimensions, retaining its intimacy in the process.
"Nature" in the city means something very particular; too. Almost any "natural" thing in the city exists because of some sort of cultural intervention, be it a movement of displacement or preservation. An orange may be found in any market in New York, but this is clearly net its natural habitat; a series of steps from grafting to transport has conspired to bring this orange to this particular place. Fay has mostly-though net exclusively-focused en materials he finds in his "naturalized" home, New York, and thus they speak as much about life in the city as works referencing skyscrapers or street traffic. Fay speaks with glee of the thousands of sweet-gum pods that litter New York sidewalks in autumn. Blown up, they look like arcane medieval weaponry, and Fay delights in the fact that his urban viewers cannot recognize what often has been before their very eyes. Once, while eating in a Japanese restaurant, this urban viewer inquired where she might find a gingko fruit like the one in her delicious custard; to her horror and amusement, the waiter responded that gingkos were collected in nearby Tompkins Square, a particularly grimy park in the heart of the Best Village. Somehow, to city dwellers, the idea that nature exists untrammeled in their midst seems incredible, so colonized is the metropolis. Ming Fay has chosen to treat with enormous care our urban culture's "nature" and, in so doing, points out the sublime possibilities of its most ordinary constituents.