Ming Fay

Ming Fay was born in Shanghai in 1943 and raised in Hong Kong. His mother was an artist, and his father worked in the burgeoning Hong Kong movie industry. Both were students of Shanghai-based sculptor Zhang Chongren, who had studied Western sculpture in Europe. He came to the United States in 1961 to study at the Columbus College of Art and Design and later at the Kansas City Institute of Art. Subsequently, Fay earned a graduate degree in sculpture at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1975. He currently teaches sculpture at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey.

Each of Fay’s elaborate multi-media sculptures are derived from organic sources, such as seed pods, vegetables, weeds, and other biomorphic forms. Made from materials including steel wire, gauze, plaster, pigment, rhoplex and acrylic, his works are simultaneously self-evident as objects and encodings of more veiled contents. Through subject matter, form, and media, Fay’s work explores the interrelationship between humans and the botanical world as it references the complex issues of Chinese folklore, botany, and contemporary urbanity.

Different items of produce in New York’s Chinatown marketplace became his subject matter and served as indices of Fay’s connection with Chinese culture: “I discovered the assigned meaning of different fruits in Chinese culture, as well as the common meaning shared with the symbolism of other cultures: oranges are considered good luck, cherries are good for love, and peaches are good for longevity. I rework some of the common images in my own way to establish the concept of a mythical folk garden.”

For Fay, a garden is a staging ground for cycles of growth, fruition, decay, death and renewal; it is a place that reminds us of our human destiny as well as a need to be in harmony with the relentlessness of change. The art critic John Yau compares him to other well known Western artists by stating, “instead of collapsing the barrier between art and culture, as Flavin, Warhol, and other have done, Fay…reminds us that nature, rather than culture, is what we all finally inhabit.”

Ming Fay has exhibited internationally in numerous solo exhibitions, and his work has frequented important group shows throughout the world. He has been awarded significant commissions from institutions such as the Redevelopment Authority of Philadelphia, the MTA of New York City, and the Department of Transportation & Public Works, Yauco, Puerto Rico. Museums that have recently exhibited his work include the He Xiangning Museum, Shenzhen, China, the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, New York, and the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, New York, which held his solo exhibition “Garden of Qian.”