Past Exhibition

Recent Work, Fung Ming Chip

10 Feb - 28 Feb  |  2006
Fung Ming-chip
Introduction
Alisan Fine Arts is proud to present “Recent Work, Fung Ming Chip” from the 10th to the 28th of February as a fringe program of the Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition 2005-06. This exhibition displays more than 20 of Fung’s works, including four from the most recent airplane landscape series.

Calligraphy is an Art unique to China and is gradually increasing in exposure and popularity. A recent exhibition “The Act of Writing and Non-writing: The Open Space for Chinese Calligraphy” held at China Fine Arts Academy, Hangzhou, provoked much reaction from the public. This exhibition attempted to demonstrate the link between traditional and new calligraphy and how calligrapher-painters try to transform calligraphy into a contemporary idiom. Including Hong Kong Artist Fung Ming Chip himself, there were participants from all over the world, showing the new calligraphers different from the traditional ones in their preference for composition over brushwork, sometimes adding constructive and deconstructive elements of paintings and emphasizing spatial qualities.

Born in 1951 in a poor village of Canton, Fung Ming Chip grew up in Hong Kong. After graduating from primary school, he went to New York in 1977. A self taught artist, he went into calligraphy through seal carving and sculpturing. In the last twenty years, he has had over 28 solo exhibitions and 43 group shows in New York, Paris, Japan, Kaohsiung, London, and Hong Kong. In 2004 he was the Artist in Residence at Jesus College, Cambridge University, UK.   

Diligently practicing traditional calligraphy since 1975, Fung is an admirer of two ancient masters Zhang Yu (Yuan dynasty), who taught him “to escape the paradigm of good and bad technique and concentrate on the effect of the line.” The other artist of the Ming dynasty, Xu Wei taught Fung that emotion and reason go hand in hand in any creation of art. Fung Ming Chip was also influenced by Abstract Expressionism, with its gestural treatment of line and space. Yet, this school of artists such as Kline, Motherwell, and Tobey have drawn their inspiration from Chinese calligraphy.

Fung remarks, “In their attempt to modernize landscape paintings, Chinese painters would often place images related to everyday life such as a car or a bus in the composition. I have chosen the image of an airplane. But rather than placing it in context of a landscape, it is floating on top of Chinese words/characters in all its manifestations be it dry, wet, dark or light ink.” The line, which is so central to calligraphy, is no longer his concern, only its effect and visual harmony.