On October 29th, Fong Chung-Ray 馮鍾睿 (b. 1934), the eminent Chinese American artist who immigrated to Taiwan as a teenager and has been based in San Francisco since 1975, will make his New York debut. This significant survey at Alisan Fine Arts will showcase the painter’s work across the continents, mediums, and the 20th and 21st centuries.
Initially catalyzed by the vigor of Abstract Expressionism in America, Fong’s practice explores mixed media with conspicuous nods to Asian tradition that demonstrate the non-Western origins of abstraction. His works incorporate xuan and cotton paper, Buddhist scriptures, and age-old techniques of calligraphy and ink painting. “As a modern Chinese painter, I am rooted in China,” he once said. “If I were to lose my roots, it would be meaningless self-exile and unforgivable ignorance.”
But Fong’s material experimentations know no boundaries. Acrylic colors are diluted to produce ink-like effects. In the 1960s, he fashioned a large, coarse brush by bundling palm fibers used to make rustic straw raincoats, producing distinctive, dramatic brushstrokes. Since embracing collage in the 1980s, he has developed increasingly varied methods for layering his pieces. He invented a technique called “reverse rubbing,” whereby he scrapes words in reverse on painted plastic sheeting before transferring them onto an artwork.
The piecemeal approach of collage allows Fong to build large canvases and the flexibility to fine-tune a composition by carefully positioning each element, a process he likens to the ancient boardgame go. Each work is an accretion of rich textures that suggest the patina of history, like a palimpsest with intricate layers of detail, and warm personal meaning. Scratched paint and flaking edges recall aged surfaces such as rock crevices, bark fissures, rusted bronze, crackled ceramics, and weathered walls.
Born to a family of scholars in the city of Nanyang in China’s Henan province, Fong grew up during the tumult of the Chinese Civil War. After the fall of Nanyang in 1948, 14-year-old Fong and an older brother secured passage to Taiwan. Fong studied fine arts at a newly established military academy in Taipei and created propaganda images and posters as an officer in the navy. In 1959, he was among the artists representing Taiwan at the São Paulo Biennial. Two years later, he joined the Fifth Moon Group 五月畫會, the prominent art collective that promulgated a move towards modernism while retaining a clear Chinese identity. Many of Fong’s works during this period involved fresh takes on traditional ink painting.
Through reading books and art journals at the United States Information Service (USIS) library, the Fifth Moon Group drew inspiration from the radical aesthetics of abstract expressionists like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. Fong saw abstraction as an approach that threw off the limits of the physical world and gave him greater freedom for individual expression. Over the course of the 1960s, his paintings toured the world, including in the American exhibition “The New Chinese Landscape.”
A Rockefeller Foundation (Asian Cultural Council) fellowship in the early 1970s enabled Fong to visit museums across Europe and the United States. The experience broadened his exposure to Western art yet deepened his confidence in his Eastern roots. Shortly afterward, Fong and his family relocated to San Francisco in 1975. For a few years, he juggled artmaking with work in stage design and as an art director for KQED television.
In 1987, a friend introduced Fong to Buddhism. He took up meditation and read canonical texts, beginning with the Diamond Sutra, which declares, “All appearances are illusory.” To Fong, this suggested that the beauty of art lies in its essence, not its form. Soon, he began to merge his daily practices of art and Buddhism, painting sacred scriptures in some of his collages. Though these passages reflect his cosmic contemplations, Fong intends such textual elements to be appreciated visually without being deciphered. Occasionally, he writes in oracle bone script – the oldest form of Chinese writing, carved on ox bones and turtle shells, which he cannot read himself.
As the art historian Mark Dean Johnson wrote, “In magnificent works that appear simultaneously ancient and contemporary, Fong balances the appearance of damage and elegance, chaos and clear focus, transparency and solidity, boldness and quietude, intimacy and grandeur, East and West.”
Fong’s works have been acquired by institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Centre Pompidou, Harvard Art Museums, Musée Cernuschi, the Ashmolean Museum, and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. In 2015, he received the Distinguished Artist Achievement Award from the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco. His painting “2018-8-6” is on permanent display at the San Francisco International Airport’s Terminal 1.
