Ming Fay |
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Gerard Haggerty
Arts Magazine
Ming Fay sculpts seeds that plant ideas. In view of the size of many of his works, it's fair to call them big ideas: observations about the relationship between mankind and nature, and the similarities between things great and small. The Shanghai-born sculptor transforms wire, gauze, paper pulp, and acrylic into fantastic vegetables: cherries big as basketballs, bell- shaped pods large enough for the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and coconuts the size of Doctor Ruth. Skulls are plentiful too, along with wishbones and fishbones and eroded sea shells.
Quite a few of these objects are placed on long patches of earth that the artist has sprinkled on the gallery floor and shaped into biomorphic patterns. The device unifies disparate parts, and encourages viewers to meander and contemplate. (Given the reality of Manhattan's streets, there is some irony in watching New Yorkers tread gingerly around the dirt.) The overview of this method of display resembles a chain of islands: think of isolated places like the Galapagos, where indigenous species stretch our idea of life's variety flirther than we'd thought possible.
When Coleridge observed that the essence of the imagination involves combining familiar things in unfamiliar ways, he was essentially discussing an act of hybridization. Ming Fay's most recent works do not represent existing natural phenomena, but instead invent plausible alternatives. Sculptures resembling tubers and ovipositors sprout from the gallery's floors and walls, like a collection of exotic hunting trophies bagged by a daring vegetarian.
Selected botanical and skeletal forms are spiked high atop tall steel rods that are lined up in front of the gallery's far wall. The ensemble looks like a string of hieroglyphs, and brings to mind the authoritative aura of natural history museums. Ming Fay creates art in the guise of artifact - though considering the degree to which pre-history is extrapolated from fragments, it's possible to claim that many authentic fossils are really sculptures commissioned by anthropologists.
Throughout this thoughtful installation, the meaning of individual works is influenced by their context. Snake Chili represents a coiled red pepper that looms large and looks especially serpentine in the company of a nearby little viper. Juxtaposed alongside a funereal urn entitled For Those Who Know, an elevated anthropomorphic wall piece implies the possibility of resurrection.
Because he understands that opposites may define each other, Ming Fay often combines images of fecundity and decay. His larger-than-life sculptures show us the face of nature in close-up, aggrandizing both the bloom and the inevitable rot. Such works offer a vivid answer to Wallace Stevens's rhetorical question, "Does ripe fruit never fall?"
The exhibition's title, Nature Reborn: From Archaeology to Science Fiction, invites the thought that time flies, and an abundance of memento-mori imagery reminds us that there are two estates within humankind: those who remember and those who are dead. Because art is the necessary link between these two categories, art thrives on death. After all, we are the only species that memorializes itself.
In the midst of mortality and decay, life's joys seem particularly sweet: suspended on filaments, a pair of anthropomorphic ginseng roots float near the ceiling and bear the hopeful title Elixirs. The blush on one three-foot-tall green bosc pear glows like an inner light, and that engorged cherry nestled over in the corner has never looked riper. (Exit Art, February 2-March 23)