`Earthly Delights' at Stone Quarry Hill |
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Syracuse Herald American -- STARS -- Sept. 21 1997, pg 23
The giant fruits, roots, seed pods, nuts, shells and wishbones in "Earthly Delights," an installation by Ming Fay now on view in the Winner Art Gallery at Quarry Hill Art Park, are teasingly ambiguous in a way that liberates meaning rather than confining it to function.
Realistic forms interact with imagined shapes that are no less organic in their derivation. We can name some of them: there's a cherry, that's a pepper. Yet they are positioned convincingly in a garden with others that are fantastical mutations, like towering green disembodied antenna of "Curve Pagoda," the sheared-off, rippling pink expanse of "Angel Wing," and the precariously stacked balls with dangerous thorns humorously titled "Prickus."
Fay, who was born in Shanghai, China, and grew up in Hong Kong, came to the United States in 1961 to study industrial design at the Columbus College of Art and Design. He went on for a bachelor of fine arts degree in sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute and an master of fine arts degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and now lives in New York City.
His work has been shown to critical acclaim throughout the United States and abroad. His 14-foot-tall painted steel gate at Public School 7 in Queens, a public commission, was featured in the 1995 Art in America Annual.
Fay was in Central New York earlier this month to lecture at area universities and to greet viewers at a reception for his installation at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, which will remain on view through Oct. 26.
"Ever since I was a child," Fay told me, "I have been fascinated by the stories of Taoist masters who have achieved power through absorbing all of nature's energy."
He sees his work as akin to alchemy; "searching for the essence of the plant." he seeks to extract its spirit and transform it into an object that conveys that pure energy.
His garden of "Earthly Delights" reflects the Taoist approach of ancient Chinese painters who entered into a spiritual oneness with the scene they wished to depict before dipping their brushes into the ink. While enticingly colorful and seeming succulent, Fay's installation nevertheless demands a meditative distance, and viewers are encouraged to sit on the benches placed across the room.
The ingrained symbolism of a Chinese world view is evident as well. "In Chinese culture, everything has meaning, especially fruits and the gesture of offering them," he said. "For example, an orange brings good luck; pears bring prosperity; peaches, longevity. A cherry signifies love and sexuality."
Other elements in the installation, such as the human-scale wishbones entwined like lovers and the spiky "Buckeye," modeled on the inedible horse chestnut that is the official plant of Ohio, are adopted from Western culture; still others have more esoteric meanings.
Medicinal powders, elixers and infusions are suggested by the large, multiple-limbed ginseng root that hangs somewhat menacingly at one corner and the horn that projects from a wall.
A riotous tangle of cherries is mixed in with the invented golden oval shapes of "Chicken Heart Seeds." This hanging display is "red-hot from the studio. The others were done over a period of 10 years." The seeds, he said, were inspired by those of elms.
Beneath the cherries and seeds, arranged on a smooth layer of Stone Quarry Hill earth, are the variously curvaceous, spiky, phallic and prickly forms both natural and imagined, engaged in groupings that are evocative of intimate conversations.
As in a Japanese stone garden, the relationships between and among these shapes are as important as the shapes themselves, and change subtly with the slightest shift in the viewer's angle of perception.
In earlier exhibitions of Fay's work, the pieces were displayed individually, as separate sculptures. As they accumulated in his studio and home, they seemed to form certain affinities. "I began to moved them around, and eventually they came together as installations."
Fay finds his sources as close at hand as the streets of lower Manhattan. "Next month, the pavement around LaGuardia Place will be covered with the seeds of all the locust trees. It will be such a strong contrast with the city environment, Nature's energy, the power of the tree to generate itself, inspires me.
"My work takes a long time to create, so there has to be some kind of energy, some sense of mystery, to make me do it."
Fay works by modeling directly over an armature. He uses steel, wire, gauze, foam, wood, Hydrocal, paper pulp, paint and pigment, and sometimes cast his pieces in bronze or transforms them into epoxy, glass, ceramic, iron or cement.
After living in the United States for 36 years, Fay went back to China for the first time. "I traveled to the mountains where the great Taoist masters had gathered," he said. "There was a mountain that went straight up. It was like a 200-story building.
"You have to walk up holding onto chains, and as you do, you see the caves and ancient dug-outs of those masters. The comes in and you feel you're in a Chinese landscape paint.
"When you're that high up, there's nothing else. You become one with your surroundings, and time is meaningless."
Fay's installation may be close to the ground; it may take its cues as much from 20th-century Western art as from traditional Chinese culture; nevertheless, when one sits on a bench in the vibrant stillness of this garden of "Earthly Delights," one enters into that timeless present.
Sherry Chayat of Syracuse has been writing free-lance articles about art for Stars since 1985.