At the End of the Rabbit Hole |
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By Lois Allan
Artweek, November 28, 1991
Volume 22, Number 10
In Ming Fay's wonderland as in Alice's, nothing is quite what is seems. Familiar fruits, nuts, pods, sheels, and bones become unfamilar giants lurking in corners, projecting from walls, perched on ledges or impaled on high poles. Like Alice emerging from the tunnel at the end of the rabbit hole, visitors here enter a strange land, both fabuilous and confusing. There are no labels to act as signposts (a gllary "map" with titles is available at the entreace); we meander along pathways indicated by the placement of dividers and shaped areas of black sand on the floor. It's necessary to both ways down as well as up, in Alice's parlances, while strolling the garden path.
Although we may be captifvated at first by the playfulness of the sculptures and their garden-like arrangement, the gradter value of Images from Beyond lies in its revelation of the cultural and psychic significance of these unprepossessing remantnts of animals, plants and minerals created in papier-mâché, ceramics, bronze and mixed media. By their forceful sculptural presence, they trigger an examination of their place in our lives. The myriad associations invested in them - with food, sex, health, myth, magic, pleasure - are Ming's theme, and he make a telling comment on the human complusion to relate all things, no matter how lowly, to individual needs and desirces. For examples, threee magnified wishboones, in sizes that are graduated from about one foot high to three feet, lean against a wall to suggest cosiderably more than a chicken dinner in the home of three three bears. Having become artifacts, they represent parallel but opposing association: the positive ones of enjoyed food and making wishes (three sizes for threee levels of wishes?), and with the darker reaility of the food chain, and, beneath it all, a memento mori.
Brodening the basis - both visually and conceptually - of the individual sculptures, Ming uses groupings as well as placement to address contextual rlationships. A droll sexual tension is at the heart of a group in which a luscious red cherry the size of a basketball rests in an open seashell, ´ la Venus; nearby is an erect green modular pod, which, like the shell, is placed on a pad of black sand. The immediate sexual import encompasses a suggestion of life's beginning as quixotically as the wishbones relate to its ending.
Whether he means to illuminated the belief, contained in Taoist philosophy, that all things in nature are related to humans or to contemplate the identical processes that govern life in all species, the artist includes specifically human forms. The first sculpture one encounters upon entering is a large, open-palmed red hand that rises from a columnar pedestal. Farther on, sculpted red lips float on the wall above a tub-sized walnut, a pear and a ching nut, and above everything, like a bad omen, a partial skull presides from the top of a pylon.
The Portland insallation Ming Fay's first on the West Coast, is a reworking and condensation of an exhibition staged last Spring at Exit Art in New York. Beccause he considers spatial relationships crucial to a full reading of the work, Ming spent several days in the Butters Gallery, planning and overseeing the installation. His placcement of pylons, the direction of lighting and the black sand areas caused a subtle alteration of the physical space, which he further individualized by creating a feathery wall frawings of seeds and shells as a counterpoint to the solid scuptures. The drawings convey a poignancy the overblown three dimensional objects lack; where the sculptures are defiantly obtrusive, the drawings seem transitory, rather like memories slipping in and out of one's consciousness.
Ming was born in China and educated in Hong Kong, but has lived in New York since 1961. For more the those years, his work functioned largely within the international modernist paradigm, and has been concerned largely with minidalist constructions. However, an evolving interest in his native cultureal traditions has led in recent years to a highly individualized, bicultural sensibility. In the physicality of his sculpture, its scale, structure and dramatic presence, it is Western, but the animating intent has become Chinese. Moreover the symbolic and magical signficance of his subjects seems to have inspired Ming to create some "natural" forms of his own, as seen in Tang, a curved pointed piece projecting from a wall. Most likely it represents a tusk, but it is equally an ambiguous, abstract sculptural form.
Crossing back and forth between two distinct art traditions, Ming Fay has found a unique freedom. He understands both the clash and the harmony among ideas that have informed and defined cultures, and h\e allows them to take exuberant form in his exotic garden.
Ming Fay through November 30 at Butters Gallery, 312 NW 10th Avenue, Portland.