Art in America |
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Robert Taplin
October 1991
Ming Fay here presented a protusion ot gigantic papier-mâché fruits, nuts and vegetables spilling out of beds ot dirt that wandered throughout the gallery. Mere sculptures hung from the ceiling, jutted out from high up on the wall or just leaned against it. Randomly mixed into this prodigious garden of edibles were a variety of other things that a child, archeologist or hungry hunter-gatherer might find in the dirt: seeds, pods, shells, sprouts, pits, bones and roots. The whole installation was punctuated by small, greenish human skulls, the only strictly life-size objects in the show. These heads (which the artist terms "Extinct Ancestors") sat sullenly on their teeth among all the burgeoning generation and decay, guietly (and perhaps in tacit admonition) recalling a past when mankind's presence was dwarted by natural processes.
This apparent criticism ot our current carelessness toward the rest ot the natural world was offset here by the exuberance and exactitude ot the artist's own relationship to his subject. Wandering among all this fabulously magnified produce and detritus, one was returned to a state ot almost childlike curiosity. Each of these reimagined natural objects appeared momentarily strange and unfamiliar, so that one's eventual recognition ot them ("My God, it's a mussel shelll") amounted to an unexpected freshening of the faculty for fascination. The artist's versions of a plum, a red pepper and a green apple are marvels of ripeness; a moment longer in the sun, you can't help but think, and they will begin to go soft. His pink conch, on the other hand, has obviously long since been abandoned by its living occupant and is now perforated by decay. The wonderful sweet gum, itchy ball and horny nut are all dry and prickly, sheltering their potential for regeneration deep within a defensive tortress. Everywhere the intensity of the sculptor's regard for nature stands as an invitation to throw off our habitual disregard tor the things under our feet and renew our relationship with the small seeds and shells of life.
This artist is not, however, unaware of the mediated character ot our interest in nature. At every turn, he points to the fact that our use of natural things, be it practical, symbolic or magical, forms the basis tor our interest in them. So the ginseng roots hang on the wall, swollen, hairy and aggressive, while their title, Elixir, reminds us of the real or imaginary power humans find in their use. The fat red cherry attracts us far more in its role as a flagrant stand-in tor female sexuality than as a mere fruit. Furthermore, there are moments when the aura of magic and fantasy around these sculptures breaks, and they revert to giant bowls of fake fruit or props for a vegetarian opera. This lurking arfiticiality or seft-consciousness feels like a didactic demonstration of how culture may threaten nature. Nevertheless, the giant, australopithecine akull (titled Big Thinker) that presides over the entire show overlooks a field of marvelously unconscious lives, among which we can momentarily lose ourselves.