Alisan Fine Arts is pleased to present A New Horizon, featuring artists Fong Chung-Ray and Hung Hsien. Both artists immigrated to Taiwan as teenagers and later settled in the US, where they reside today; Fong in California, and Hung in Texas. Fong and Hung were part of the Fifth Moon Group, a prominent Taiwan art collective that promulgated a move towards modernism while retaining a clear Chinese identity. The focus of this exhibition, however, is the evolution of each artist’s work during their subsequent time spent in the US. Both were influenced by their new surroundings, and as their styles matured, they introduced elements of their cultural tradition in different ways, each creating their own unique contemporary artistic language.
Fong Chung-Ray
Fong studied fine arts at a newly established military academy in Taipei, and in 1959, he was among the artists representing Taiwan at the São Paulo Biennial. Two years later, he joined the Fifth Moon Group, and 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.
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. He began to use collage in his work, developing an unorthodox technique where acrylic is applied onto thin sheets of plastic to produce patterns that are then transferred onto paper or canvas.
Fong also 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.
Fong titles his paintings according to the date of completion; they take months and sometimes years to finish. One of Fong’s most recent works, 2025-7-14, undulates in serene earth tones, with areas of orange and blue emerging beneath the many layers of acrylic. A quote from the Diamond Sutra can be made out amongst the patches of color: “One should give rise to the mind that dwells nowhere” – an apt description of the meditative state that Fong enters when creating his art. Apart from the characters that appear in his work, Fong’s paintings are usually wholly abstract, but in some cases, figuration will appear, as in 2004-41, where the image of chrysanthemum flowers appear in the top right section of the piece. Delicately rendered, they look as if they are carved directly into the surface, almost like fossilized forms uncovered in a rocky cliff face.
Fong’s works have been acquired by institutions such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums, USA; Centre Pompidou, Musée Cernuschi, France; Ashmolean Museum, UK; and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan.
Hung Hsien
Hung Hsien moved to Taiwan with her family in 1948, where she had the unique opportunity to study with Pu Ru, the former Manchu Prince who oversaw the court painting tradition of the late Qing Dynasty. She went on to study at National Taiwan Normal University, where she was taught by artists including Chao Chung-Hsiang and Chu Teh-chun. Hung immigrated to the US in 1958 and enrolled in graduate courses at Northwestern University, studying painting with George Cohen and Ted Halkin, prominent members of the postwar artist group “Monster Roster”. These new influences, coupled with her discovery of Arshile Gorky at the Art Institute of Chicago, led to a transformation in her style: her works became more abstract, and she began to hone a practice of creating work in an automatic, near dream state of mind.
In 1966, artist Liu Guo-Song, founder of the Fifth Moon Group in Taiwan, was visiting the US and reconnected with Hung Hsien, who had been a classmate at NYNU. They found a kinship in their return to the use of ink, and the encounter brought Hung back to Asia. She was officially invited to join the Fifth Moon Group in 1969, and took part in their annual exhibitions from 1971 to 1974 in Taipei, as well as a Fifth Moon group exhibition at the Denver Art Museum in 1973. Hung was invited to teach in Hong Kong at the Chinese University in 1978. It was during these years that her own unique vocabulary and style emerged.
This style can be seen in the works Scudding Clouds & Rocks (1970) and Mountain Peaks (1971), which fuse her expressive brushstrokes with flowing, abstract forms. Hung’s use of color is striking, not only because of the vibrant hues she uses, but because they appear within areas of open space that give her blocks of color a sense of intention. As the titles suggest, Hung often bases her compositions on nature, and she treats them as highly abstracted landscapes. In later works like Beach Rocks (1985), recognizable forms once again appear in her compositions, although they are executed, as always, in her highly personalized, lyrical manner.
In 1984, after spending a few years in Hong Kong and Taipei, Hung Hsien returned to the US. She settled in Houston, Texas, where she still resides today and continues to paint and teach. A solo show of her work was held at the Portland Art Museum in 1987, and recently, nearly 3 decades later, a major retrospective of her work was shown at Asia Society Houston in 2025, traveling to Asia Society Hong Kong in 2026. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum, the Portland Art Museum, Hong Kong Art Museum, Cleveland Art Museum, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
