Mixed Blessings - New Art in a Multicultural America |
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Excerpt from the book "Mixed Blessings - New Art in a Multicultural America"
by Lucy R. Lippard 1889
Pantheon Books, NY
pages 143-144
The lives and work of first-generation Chinese American artists illuminate some of the dilemmas and choices made. Ming Fay, who was born in Shanghai, came to the United States on scholarship in 1961 at the age of eighteen, after studying with traditional Chinese teachers in English schools in Hong Kong, where he was raised. At first his heritage was a burden, and he made monumental geometric sculpture in an international style. By the late '70s he was ready to confront his past, or rather his bicultural present. He began to make a sculptural "Celestial Garden," where all the plants grew supernaturally large and each claimed mysterious powers based in traditional Chinese symbolism.
(The peach, for example, is a magical fruit of longevity, cherries are love, and there are also "herbs of immortality, the elixir of life and aphrodisiac plants")
Fay also sees his swelling vegetables, fruits, and root figures in a more contemporary vein as metaphors for sexuality, humor, and irony.
The fruits led to a series called "Relics" - natural at first, then cultural. Ming Fay began with giant dried-up seedpods and broken seashells. He neither imitates nor idealizes Nature. These literally "marvelous" objects are layered composites of reality and memory, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the cheerful elephantiasis of Pop Art. Barry Schwabsky has described Ming Fay's snail, its shell both mathematically perfect and physically battered, as a point of intersection, producing "a kind of spatial elision or syncopation, a playing off of silence against a steady beat. The result in an evocative reverie on duration." The same could be said of the series of wishbones and ancestral skulls that followed. The skulls are sometimes fragmented, sometimes associated with an ancient artifact, as though spanning the whole history of the human race as a means of bonding backwards, with a land the artist barely knew.