Over the past four decades, Alisan Fine Arts’ mission has been to introduce global audiences to Chinese diaspora artists. Our expansion to New York in 2023 reinforced our commitment to showcasing Chinese and Asian artists living and working in the US, many of whom were overlooked during their lifetimes. It is a longstanding goal of the gallery to not only connect the artists whom we worked with in the 1980s with a new generation of artists working here today, but also to provide a platform for these artists moving forward.
For Art Basel Miami, we are excited to present the work of six Chinese American artists, Chinyee, Fong Chung-Ray, Walasse Ting, Ming Fay, Yifan Jiang, and Kelly Wang, alongside Chinese Diaspora artists Justin Lim (Malaysia) and Fu Xiaotong (Berlin). Spanning two generations, this group of artists showcases the rich ongoing history of Asian Diasporic art. Recent institutional interest in their work, both in the US and Europe, is a testament not only to the individual artists’ work, but also to the cultural importance of their collective voices in the contemporary art world.
Chinyee, Ming Fay, and Walasse Ting were born in China but emigrated to the US as young adults and built their artistic careers there. Fay and Ting were fixtures of New York’s downtown art scene, with the elder Ting serving as a mentor to Ming Fay, who came to the city about a decade later. Chinyee lived and worked in upstate New York, although she did exhibit in the city as well starting in the 1960s. Ironically, all three artists are more recognized in Asia than in the West, although this has begun to change in recent years, as they are experiencing a resurgence of attention among art institutions at the moment. Ting had his first US solo exhibition Parrot Jungle at the NSU Museum of Art in 2023 and was included in exhibitions in 2024 at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and at the Norton Simon. A large-scale retrospective for Ming Fay opened this summer at the Isabella Gardener Museum in Boston. Chinyee was featured last year in the critically acclaimed exhibition Action / Gesture / Paint: a global story of women and abstraction 1940-70, exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery in the UK, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh in Arles, France, and Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany.
Fong Chung-Ray is part of the same generation, although he came to the US via Taipei in 1975. He has lived through cultural shifts that profoundly shaped his artistic identity: as a member of the influential Fifth Moon Group, a Rockefeller Foundation fellow, and a lifelong Buddhist practitioner, he has continually expanded the language of abstraction while remaining rooted in Eastern heritage. His works have been collected by major institutions including LACMA, the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Ashmolean Museum.
Kelly Wang and Yifan Jiang represent the current generation of Chinese American artists – both were born in the US, and are part of a so-called ‘third culture’ that has been used to describe the sprawling Asian Diaspora across the globe. Jiang’s paintings explore her experiences growing up in a world of multiple cultures and languages. Inspired by everyday events, passages from books, or experiences from her travels, her work hones in on the banal—examining the gray intersections between the scientific, the psychological and the magical. Wang combines industrial materials (resin, aluminum) with Chinese ink and paper in an attempt to reconcile a centuries old tradition with the present-day reality. Yifan Jiang’s work has been collected by the The Dallas Art Museum and the Roswell Museum in New Mexico, and Kelly Wang’s work has been collected by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Washington and Lee, Smith College, Harvard Art Museums and Princeton Museum of Art.
Justin Lim is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and was recently a recipient of the Kates-Ferri Projects Artist-in-residence, New York City, USA (2025). Lim’s visual language bridges Southeast Asian material culture with the still-life tradition of European painting, building interior scenes that feel at once tenderly specific and universally resonant. The spaces, though seemingly devoid of human presence, are deeply inhabited. Lim reflects that, “In some ways, these are all self-portraits, but I also wanted to imagine what kind of person would inhabit these spaces.” In complete contrast, Fu Xiaotong’s monochromatic pinprick works are a fresh interpretation of “traditional” landscape compositions. She graduated with a Master's degree in Experimental Art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2013, and currently teaches at the School of Arts at the North China University of Technology and resides in Beijing and Germany. Fu’s works are held in the collections of Harvard Art Museums, Dallas Museum of Art, the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art, LACMA, White Rabbit Collection, and the Zhejiang Art Museum.
With renewed institutional interest in Chinyee, Fong Chung-Ray, Ming Fay and Ting’s careers, alongside a palpable excitement among curators surrounding Yifan Jiang, Fu Xiaotong, Justin Lim and Kelly Wang’s work, we believe that our presentation at Art Basel Miami will be timely and well-received. It is our hope that our participation in the fair will bring added awareness to the diversity within Asian Diasporic art and serve as a point of connection between the two generations.
