The Alchemist of Spirits - July / August 1994 |
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Sculptor Ming Fay, 51, has found a rich harvest in plants and fruits and bones. He creates forms from the everyday and a muthology of the world around him that will not wither.
By Kathleen Finley Magnan
As an artist who has been working in New York for almost two deacdes, how would you categorize your variations of urban "garden" sculptures?
My work is a site-specific combination/installation of objects that touches an organic theme with spiritual meanings. It is not about science. It is about mystery, nature, and mankind. It is also about the mix of all these things - a sculptural representation.
These are single objects, but as time goes on they accumulate and become groupings that are meaningful in different ways. You are talking to a person who has been making these things for a long time. They come in all kinds of categories. Skin is one such grouping. There are shells, plants, skulls, bones, hybrid and mysterious forms and structures of nature. The most obvious, and earliest ones, are the fruits and vegetables which are still being made. I see them as fruit trees in my garden that continue to grow and bear new fruits every year. Things evolve and I investigate them as time goes by.
Your plants and vegetables will never wither or become over-ripe and shall remain in a perfect state while surround life continues to mature and decay. Do these works function as reminders of our own ephemerality amidst an enduring metropolis?
There are symbolic meanings in my work in the fact that they are sort of sculptures or objects that have attained some kind of tug-of-war between immortaility and symbolic language. Mankind is moving on but it still goes for the same metaphors that have endured. The symbol's timely transcendence is one of the themes I approach in my sculpture.
As life evolves, the symbolic issues of death and decay came up in my work. The idea of death was one symbol that I had not previously touched and I explored it with much thought. The skull and my fear of mortality eventually became a new batch of work. All the while, I realized life goes on. So what? So now I know. I must go forward to find the meaning of life and what is that? I do not know what that is. So I looked for more to life and at this point, my work became less specifically symbolized by known shapes and forms. They just became forms. What do these forms mean? What happends if I eat them? What happends if I look at them too long and what do they mean to me? We come back to sculpture where we discuss forms and shapes which always have some kind of hidden meaning in them. My forms deal with that issue as well.
How did your work progress from the bones to the newer sking works?
I looked forward and backwqrds and realized that I had a lot of things to record. That is where the skins started to emerge. I peeled the skin off some plant to took another layer off of something else. The peeled skin is a symbol of recording a time passage. It represents a path, a map, or just a period. Almost like a skin that has been shed. So that became another category that opened up for me.
The bones, like the wishbone, are part of an earlier period. There are all kinds of bones and every bone has its own meaning invested in it. I invent bone forms and make them look very convincing - as if they belong to some unknown species. It is again the issue of muthological imagery here. Meanwhile the work just kind of grows into different categories.
In Nature Reborn: From Archeology to Science Fiction sculpted skeletal remains are set atop steel rods while your riper vegetables lay on the gallery floor. How do these two subjects relate when places together? How does your work function in the context of a gallery setting where everything is artificial? When it is in the gallery context, where everything is white and the space is empty, I put a bone right in there and the room becomes different. I place a skull with another skull or a bone and skull together, then it becomes drama. What happens if you put an apple next to it? That is another layered narrative. So these objects become almost like actors. One object may play the role of death, but that is not necessarily the only role available. so I am interested in many aspects of role-playing. It would also depend on the context of the exhibition. Different pieces function together in different curatorial contexts.
The skins have a painterly quality to them. How does that translate to the sculptural objects?
The sculptural work itself has many painterly concerns. I feel that they are bascially three-dimensional paintings. The surfaces of the sculptures are worked and painted to represent the skin of the piece. When I peel the surface of the skin off the piece, I get just the skin. In the same way, I peel off the metaphor of painting as well. Rather than endorse the doctrine that primary materials stand on their own, I feel that the work, in order to functin in my theme, needs that layer of paint. That was one of the rules that I wanted to twist. Painted sculpture has its own history. How one paints it and who paints it is important. Everyone paints differently. The specialty or a trademark of my work is that each piece is well-crafted and articulately painted.
As an artist living in New York, would you say that the art scene, coupled with just general city living, erects many social walls?
Plenty of walls. It is a toguh time now. It is a big scene, but it is also very small and competitive. However, the energy is still very vital. As you get older, you almost have to be within a certain aesthetic vein. Next month, the younger artists will come in and move sculpture, paintings, walls, and sheet rock. I was once there and went through all that. The amazing part is that they are still coming in droves to build walls. Those walls serve as the metaphorical walls that are being built and being taken down. Just recently, I went to a gallery that was completely transformed for a new exhibition. There is eneregy and chaos in the young art scene. Building and rebuilding -- it all translates to time. Everyone gets 24 hours a day.
As an Asian artist in New York, have you encountered any difficulties?
There are thicker walls or walls that shouldn't be there but are. One has more problems when there is a cultural barrier. However integrated into the big melting pot one is, there will always be barriers for artists from other cultures. The fact that your magazine [Asian Art News] is here is a prime example that a different economic sense is emerging. More than ever, Asian art is being produced for a wider audience while the international market is changing.
How did you come to live in New York and what changes emerged in your work with that transition?
I grew up in Hong Kong and completed my college education in Ohio, Kansas City, and later California, where I finished graduate school. I went back to Ohio to teach, then moved to Pennsylvania and finally to New York. I have been living and working in New York for over 20 years. This body of work represents New York to me. It did not exist prior to New York. I used to do minimalist, geometrical, steel welding. Looking back, part of this has to do with right angles, the concrete, and the structure of the which made me look at ordinary things in ntaure. If I had not come to New York, maybe I would not have produced this body of work.
In the fall, every year, I get excited about a certain city block where I can get seed pods from various trees. There are really only four or five kinds of trees in the city that can survive well. By New York University, where Alan Sonfists's forest is, there are also some huge locust seeds. There are strong messages from here in New York.
When I first started, I did still life drawings which I ultimately related to my urban surroundings. From there, I started to really look at fruits, vegetables, and plants and found that the beauty in them contrasted with the harsh city angles. Then I thought about how I could make one. Could I make one really large, the same size or smaller?
Would you say that these lively fruit and vegetable sculptures are refelections of our own memorialization of death and what remains of the spirit?
The spirit of possessing a plant either visually or physically is a factor in my work. That spirit is enlarged in an obsessive way to recreate life forms in every way that I can manage. All forms of life have a cycle, problems, predators, and different ways of survival among plants. Here, we come back to the bigger issues -- good/evil, life/death and yin/yang or a dance of Shiva kind of thing. I go back and forth between the two polarities. So on the way, I realize that this is what it is all about. Only the spirit remains. That fulfills the needs of life in the context of the city. This, in a micro sense or biological sense, is the possibility of the spirit.
My work is like alchemy, extracting the power of the spirit from the plant and transforming it into other manmade forms. Mankind looks into natures, tries to figure it out, and takes whatever possible from it. In a mythological sense, this is what I am doing as well. I am trying to get as much as I can out of these natureal objects. I am not necessarily transforming objects into their own forms, which are very bulky, but into their collective essence. I am searching for the essence of the plant. Alchemy is a state of mind -- its more of a poetic kind of thing. In the Chinese culture, I am more attuned to the Taoist philosophical approach. They are alchemists who search for the immortal way -- to perform some kind of longevity. However, what does one do? -- exercise more, eat well? They all die eventually.
The alchemists also injected part of their own personalities into the chemical mixture, which nevertheless required other various physical factors for the final transmutation.
Apart from your role as artist/alchemist, are there any other demands placed on you for the completion of your installations? In the near future, where do you see your work going?
For over 15 years, I have continued to produce this body of work from nature. Since I began my life here in New York, I observed natural forms and other objects and gave their aesthetic translations a home. This is the headquarters -- the core -- where they come and go. They come from the outside which is like a loading dock that I have not yet opened. There are things that are ready to be transported from this area and things in different stages of coming and going. I am the gardener of all this and I go out and explore the outside world. I am kind of like a gatherer or an explorer that goes out to look for different things of interest. The whole thing is, like a mythological alchemy, that I am cooking up. Currently, I am making glass instruments to extract whatever potency, whatever power, the objects from nature have. For me, form no longer exists as it is. This is the future of my work.
Kathleen Finley Magnan is a New York-based art critic.