New York Times - 1991 |
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By Michael Brenson
Friday, February 15, 1991
Review/Art
Ming Fay
Exit Art
578 Broadway (near Prince Street)
Through March 23
"Nature Reborn: From Archeolo gy to Science Fiction, 1979-1990", Ming Fay's garden of earthly delights, is surely the most enchanted installation of the new year. It includes almost 100 sculptures of animal, vegetable and mineral forms made by Mr. Ming over more than a decade. Almost all of them, no matter how different, are made from the same kind of papier-mâché. They float on the walls, sit up in corners, stand like scarecrows and unfold in groups along an Alice in Wonderland - like soil path stretching from one side of this large exhibition space to the other.
The objects that inspired these sculptures come from the earth or sea. But the scale of Mr. Ming's sculptures is peculiar, with the exception of his urns and skulls, the kind of objects that could have been excavated from the earth in archeological digs. His coconut is the size of a walrus, and his walnut the size of a sea turtle. Three of his family of wishbones leaning against the wall are the size of a man (a fourth, a baby wishbone, is by itself nearby), and his conchs are the size of an artillery shell The objects are wildly oversize, and some of them, like the coconut, still seem to be growing.
One reason the objects are so effective is Mr. Ming's powerfully sculptural feeling for shape and scale, which makes the objects seem normal and almost inevitable despite their overblown size. Another reason is his humor. His cherry sits in a corner like a naughty child, his fat buttocksy plums belong in a bawdy ballad. Mr. Ming's sculptures are distant relatives of the giant fruits of Claes Oldenburg, the giant shells of Tony Cragg and the organic figural abstractions of Robert Therrien.
Another rooson for the effectiveness of this show is that the objects are filled with intention. Mr. Ming was born in Shanghai. He has the Chinese sense that everything in nature has symbolic meaning and every activity and response in human life has some origin or parallel in the natural world Because each of his organic objects carries such symbolIc weight, walking through this show is like entering an ever-changing allegory of decay and growth, temptation and asceticism, continuity and change. These objects seem to have everything we have and to be capable of doing everything we do. In Mr. Ming's sci-fi, post-apocalyptic world, nature will not miss human beings one bit.