Upcoming 2025-09-03 - 2025-10-25
Alisan Fine Arts New York is proud to present Ming Fay: Botanical Curiosities, a solo exhibition of the Chinese-American sculptor and installation artist Ming Fay. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with Alisan Fine Arts in New York and his fourth with the gallery overall. Featuring work from the 1970s to the present, the exhibition invites viewers into Fay’s lifelong exploration of nature, mythology, and the hybrid terrain between science and art.
Fay’s sculptures, known for their oversized fruits, kaleidoscopic seeds, twisting vines, skeletal shells, and hybrid plant forms, straddle the line between imagination and environmental reflection. For decades, the artist has cultivated a personal Eden, one rooted in both botanical reality and speculative fantasy. Drawing from his deep knowledge of Eastern and Western horticultural traditions and folklore, Fay reimagines nature as a theatrical ecosystem—otherworldly yet uncannily familiar. His sculptural works, composed from papier-mâché, bronze, ceramic, steel, rice paper, and polystyrene foam, celebrate and question the relationship between humankind and the natural world. The first gallery of the exhibition showcases a wall of various seeds, fruits, and ‘hybrids’ – forms invented by the artist that are rooted in his investigations of natural flora. Rarely seen bronzes of a leaping dog and Tai-Chi figures are also included in the room, sitting underneath Fay’s well-known Money Tree branches.
In addition to Fay’s signature larger-than-life sculptures, Botanical Curiosities offers an intimate look at the artist’s creative process. Displayed in the second gallery are rarely exhibited works on paper—sketches, studies, and paintings created in the 1970s and 80s, including two rare acrylic on canvas works that reveal Fay’s accomplished skills as a painter. These pieces provide insight into the evolution of Fay’s visual language and reveal the conceptual and material foundations of his sculptural practice. A highlight of this section is two small mosaics based on the design of Fay’s Delancey Street subway installation. Across several murals in the station, Ming Fay depicts a cherry orchard that was originally part of the Delancey family farm, on today's Orchard Street; he also depicts a school of Shad fish, which make runs through New York rivers every spring, representing the travel of immigrants across the ocean. The inclusion of early works, drawings, and mosaics allows the exhibition to function as a focused retrospective, tracing the development of key motifs including shell, fruit, and seed forms that recur throughout Fay’s oeuvre.
Born in Shanghai in 1943, Ming Fay moved to Hong Kong during childhood and later immigrated to the United States in 1961. He earned a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since settling in New York City in the 1970s, Fay has exhibited extensively and maintained a parallel career as an educator, teaching at institutions such as Pratt Institute, MICA, and William Paterson University. In the 1980s and 90s, Fay was an active member of two pioneering Asian American artist collectives: the Epoxy Art Group and the Godzilla: Asian American Art Network. His involvement in these groups reflects an ongoing engagement with issues of diaspora, identity, and visibility in American contemporary art.
Fay’s work draws equally from observation and invention, balancing botanical accuracy with speculative fantasy. Inspired by the fruit markets of Chinatown, Chinese folk deities, global trade routes, and the engineered modifications of food systems, his sculptures question how cultural and ecological forces reshape what we grow, consume, and revere. An orange may become a symbol of good luck; a pear, prosperity. Yet, in Fay’s world, these symbols are distorted and magnified—evoking both abundance and excess, celebration and ecological unease. In his own words, “I strive to demonstrate the wonder of even the humblest natural forms, lending the viewer a new appreciation of the ordinary.”
At a time of accelerating environmental crisis, Fay’s work resonates with new urgency. His skeletal fish and bird forms—elegiac and eerie—serve as both homage and warning. His hybrid fruits and invented seeds reflect both utopian desire and dystopian consequence. Yet Botanical Curiosities is not solely a space of critique; it is also a celebration. It is a reminder that life is cyclical, that seeds encapsulate potential, and that imagination itself is a form of ecological resilience.
