Essay by Margo Machida

Culturalist Conceptualism and the Art of Ming Fay

The most fundamental story of humanity is its spread to virtually every

place on earth, its numbers expanding prodigiously over millennia by

adapting to the planet’s many climates, and successfully manipulating

and altering its resources and environments, including the evolution of

its plant and animal life. The widespread circulation of people, goods,

and ideas, is therefore an inherently ancient phenomenon. Yet the scale

and rapidity of the world’s transformation following the post-World War

II collapse of centuries-old Western empires, a process further

accelerated with the cessation of the Cold War, is unprecedented.

Today, we live in a global economy that is becoming every more

interdependent, characterized by massive population shifts driven by

the exigencies of worldwide commerce, labor markets, and modern

transportation and communication networks, as well as by warfare and

social upheaval. Indeed, as British cultural critic Stuart Hall

observes, “migration has turned out to be the world historical event of

late modernity.” [1]

In an era characterized by hypermobility and the permeability of

national boundaries, growing numbers of Asian artists are witnesses to,

and participants in contemporary migration. As a result, experiences of

transcultural passage, intertwining thematics of movement and place,

are emerging as significant motifs in their work as they circulate

between Asia, worldwide Asian diasporas, and the United States. For

Asians and Asian Americans, the removal in 1965 of long-standing

restrictions on Asian immigration based on a discriminatory national

origins quota has radically transformed the domestic situation. With

the explosive growth of new immigration from all parts of Asia,

immigrants now considerably outnumber the U.S.-born generations, and

matters of cross-cultural mediation and positioning are increasingly of

artistic and critical concern. Often drawing on influences and

frameworks of meaning derived from multiple cultural sources, such

visual production can pose significant challenges to interpretation.

Further, once entering the social and political sphere of this nation,

whether as travelers, voluntary migrants, or refugees, Asian artists

often find themselves having to contend with the politics of place,

historically embedded experiences, politically determined status, and

racialized representations to which they become heir by simply crossing

its “threshold.” In this context, cultural identification -- no matter

how mediated or multidimensional -- can become a defining force in an

Asian diasporic artist’s work.

As a scholar and curator who grew up in Hawai’i, the only state with an

Asian majority, I found the transition to New York City in the late

1960s to be difficult and complicated. In retrospect, I realized that

there are certain commonalities between my experience of internal

migration from the Pacific islands to the continental U.S., and the

passage of immigrants artists acclimating to a place and culture

significantly different from what they have known. One of the memorable

encounters that first catalyzed my interest in questions of how self

and collective identities are rearticulated through the migratory

process was with the Shanghai-born sculptor Ming Fay. A faculty member

at William Paterson College in New Jersey, Ming Fay was a founding

member of the Epoxy Art Group. This essay provides an opportunity to

renew a conversation with the artist that first began in 1985, during

the group’s exhibition at Basement Workshop, a pioneering Asian

American community arts organization in Manhattan’s Chinatown with

which I was involved.

Ming Fay was born in 1943 in Shanghai, one of the first treaty ports

forced upon the Imperial Chinese government by various European nations

beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Formerly known as “The Paris

of the East,” and best described as a “polycentric, decentered city

controlled by many different hands,” [2] (Ackbar Abbas, 774) Shanghai

had more than 60,000 foreign residents by the 1930’s, and English was

widely spoken. Not unlike many modern Chinese who grew up in cities

that once had large Western enclaves, Ming Fay’s early life was

strongly shaped by cosmopolitan sensibilities. Moreover, having been

born under Japanese occupation during World War II, the artist retains

vivid recollections of the enormous appeal of newly available export

items from the United States during the brief period of prosperity that

followed Japan’s defeat in 1945. As he recounts, “There was a craze for

anything American, from chewing gum to hot dogs, cowboys to submarines,

Mickey Mouse to Superman, and blue jeans to tuxedos... I remember

watching Walt Disney cartoons and cowboy movies and drinking Coca Cola

[as] something very special.” [3] (Correspondence 3/28/04)

Given the anti-Western and anti-commercial policy which prevailed with

the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Ming Fay’s

family joined an outpouring of Chinese, many of whom settled in Hong

Kong. Similar to Shanghai, Hong Kong, a port city and former Crown

Colony of the British Empire, had thrived as a crossroads of

international trade. Living in Hong Kong from the age of nine to

eighteen, Fay came to regard it as an “extension of old Shanghai,” not

only because of the wealthy business elites who relocated there, but

also due to both cities’ kindred histories of extensive foreign,

primarily Anglophonic, influence. Describing the giant neon signs

advertising SONY, Toshiba, and other brand names that dominated the

skyline of Hong Kong’s harbor, Ming Fay speaks of the charged

atmosphere of such global economic zones: “Hong Kong’s called the Pearl

of the Orient. Why? Because it’s one of the most commercial, big-time

places. It’s a cosmos of that stuff. [That’s] the culture where I grew

up.” [4] (interview)

Ming Fay’s interest in visual art and culture was stimulated by being

raised in an artistic family in which both parents had studied with

Zhang Chongren, a European-trained sculptor who returned to China to

teach Western techniques. According to the artist, his mother owned the

first wax museum in Hong Kong, and his father was employed in the local

film and television industry as an art director. Throughout his youth,

he observed his parents working on product designs, as well as

exhibitions of wax figures, and puppetry projects, allowing him to see

firsthand how such objects are crafted. Fascinated by American popular

culture, and especially Western film, Fay secured an art school

scholarship in 1961 to study in the United States. As a self-described

“big city boy,” the artist would ultimately gravitate to New York City,

another world-class cosmopolitan center and port city with a large

Chinese population. In the early 1970s Ming Fay set up a studio on Canal
Street in Soho near Chinatown. Throughout he emphasizes the importance place has
in

fundamentally shaping his art: “I believe the [current] work actually

comes out of being in New York... Being Chinese lead me to know and

meet a lot of Chinese artists and ...artists from other countries who

choose to be in this great metropolis... New York interests me because

it is unique and I know of no other place that has this kind of

energy.” [5] (Goodman interview/essay)

The shared presence in New York of urban Chinese from Hong Kong and

mainland China catalyzed the formation of Epoxy Art Group. Epoxy, whose

name alludes to the potent “glue” bonding Asian and Western cultural

influences, was formed in 1982 by six artists who met one another in

New York. What began as an informal social network organically evolved

into a decade-long collaborative effort to mount a series of multimedia

installations and performances that dealt with cross-cultural phenomena

from an explicitly Chinese standpoint. Given both Hong Kong and

Shanghai’s long histories as international “contact zones” [6] where

Western and other influences have had a definitive impact through trade

and an imposed foreign presence, urban Chinese artists like these are

in many respects already attuned to, and fluent in the visual

vocabularies of cultural hybridization. Such artists knowingly

negotiate complex intercultural discursive spaces that are at once

“Chinese,” and also syncretic and continually evolving in response to

changing conditions.

Epoxy’s experiments with what I term “culturalist conceptualism”

represent a perspective that is not only intimately connected to

transcultural experience, but also is inspired by the artists’ need to

manifest their perceptions of a distinctly non-Western (here Chinese)

way of conceiving the world from a position of being in the West. As

Fay reflects, our “common heritage has been really transformed into a

conceptual tradition rather than a [specific] practice tradition.” [7]

(Interview, 11/11/89) In this usage, the term “conceptualism” is not

intended to link such work to late 1960s Conceptual Art, with its

anti-commercial emphasis on the idea rather than on the object as being

of paramount importance. Instead, “culturalist conceptualism” stresses

how the intellectual and associative thought processes behind art can

be influenced by the artist’s background and experience. Certainly, to

the extent that the underlying structures of meaning embedded in a work

of art that draws on aspects of non-Western sources may not be

transparent to viewers in this country, dialogue with artists provides

a source for much-needed contextual understanding of material that

would not otherwise be readily accessible.

Emerging at a time when galleries were flourishing in Soho and the East

Village, Epoxy served as a “viewing platform” [8] from which to

surveil and address what its members discovered during their forays as

recent arrivals to the city. Comparing their improvisational efforts to

those of a jazz ensemble, Fay remarks, “We’re strangers, we’re all

transplants; there was no guru that explains it to you. It’s just

interaction.” [8] (interview) Their desire to assert a common presence

inspired them to delve more deeply into their own cultural resources,

both by finding means of attaching themselves to this new place, and by

emphasizing active connections between their homeland and the diaspora.

An initial opportunity presented itself with the then-current

political turmoil surrounding former President Reagan’s official denial

of misconduct during the Iran-Contra investigations. Seizing on the

moment, the members of Epoxy recognized that these present-day

political maneuvers in their adopted country had antecedents in Chinese

history, and that the principles governing such actions had already

been well codified in proverbs from ancient Chinese texts, such as the

Thirty Six Stratagems. [9] Familiar to many Chinese, this compendium

of writings gathered over centuries brings together the sagacious

contributions of many politicians, military leaders, merchants,

writers, and philosophers. Its themes reflect the influence of

multiple Chinese sources, including literature, folklore, religion, and

Sun Tzu’s classic The Art of War, a text of military strategy. Through

the principles it enumerates, the Thirty Six Stratagems provides means

of analyzing the dynamics of history, business, politics, and human

behavior -- and identifies successful modes of deception,

confrontation, opportunism, and retrenchment as lessons for survival,

based on parlaying both relative positions of strength and weakness to

advantage.

In the multimedia work Thirty Six Tactics (1988), xeroxed archival and

media images based on current events are paired with pithy proverbs

inscribed in both English and Chinese, underscoring how commentaries

derived from the accumulated wisdom of China’s past handily anticipate

and shed light on present-day political affairs. In part through a

conscious decision to translate the proverbs for English-speaking

audiences, insights linked to a sense of deep history emerging from a

millennial civilization are put forward as meaningful epistemic

resources for Chinese and non-Chinese alike to negotiate and make sense

of the times in which we live. According to critic Thomas McEvilley,

the "visual arts have a global social importance today that is quite

independent of formalist notions of aesthetic presence. A culture's

visual tradition embodies the image it has of itself... and of its

value and place in the world." [10] Seemingly paralleling the intent

of the ancient text, Epoxy’s Thirty Six Tactics can itself be viewed as

a strategic maneuver on the terrain of visual culture, a positional

deployment by Chinese diasporic artists to assert their sense of

cultural co-equality and authority in the West.

As Adrienne Tam notes, through Epoxy’s contemporary reinterpretation of

ancient sayings, “The calculations and tricks of the people who fill up

the evening news and our history books,[are] caught and identified for

what they are.” [11] In Fool Heaven Sail Sea,, for example, the utter

denial of misconduct by former President Ronald Reagan in “trading

weapons for hostages” during the Iran-Contra investigations is

interpreted as a tactic to camouflage one’s true activities and thereby

“smuggle something past heaven’s (authority’s) checkpoint.” [12]

Another work, Golden Cicada Sliding Off Its Slough, illustrates a

tactic of indirection that involves focusing an enemy’s attention

elsewhere in order to aid one’s escape. Here, Epoxy refers to

ex-President Richard Nixon’s dramatic 1974 announcement of his

resignation on national television, suggesting that by taking this

preemptive step he had managed to not only successfully dodge immediate

impeachment, but to also avoid potential criminal charges for the

Watergate fiasco by obtaining an official pardon from his chosen

successor. Guest Becomes Host pairs the photograph of a Caucasian

Honda plant worker with the legend, “The Japanese move in: Ohio plant

worker.” This piece refers to another topical issue: growing

consternation in the 1980s that Japan would soon dominate the United

States automobile industry, through establishing its own plants in this

country and reducing all Americans to the subordinate status of mere

employees. Illustrating one of the tactics for gaining contested

ground, it conveys a cautionary message that a “guest,” once allowed to

enter the host’s house, could easily displace the host and seize it for

her or himself.

Long engaged in exploring the material and metaphysical connections

between man and nature, Ming Fay’s own studio work is quite different

in character. Intrigued by the innate beauty he finds in the forms and

colors of living things, he is best known for highly representational,

outsized sculptural renderings of fruit, vegetables, roots, and seed

pods. After moving to New York, the artist’s earliest sculptural

experiments were inspired by the shapes of fruit and vegetables in

local Chinatown green markets. Beyond providing bodily sustenance, the

artist chose these familiar foods for the auspicious cultural

associations they hold for the Chinese. He relates, “I used the most

common folk symbols from the Chinese culture as my reference materials,

such as oranges for good luck, ...peaches for longevity, pears for

prosperity.” [13] (Goodman interview) Fay continually added to this

repertoire, drawing on the forms of medicinal herbs, horns, and bones,

gradually conjoining many of these motifs in highly elaborate

environmental mixed media installations characterized as “mythical folk

gardens.” The method employed in producing these works involves direct

modeling over wire armatures, a technique for making kites and paper

lanterns common among Chinese artisans and taught to him by his mother.

Driven by an abiding interest in exploring themes of cultural

co-mingling, transplantation, and transformation, Fay argues against

all notions of purity in nature and human societies. Instead he regards

the human and natural worlds as thoroughly interconnected, a continuum

of sentient being enmeshed in a reciprocal “coevolutionary”

relationship [14] (cite Botany of Desire) in which human beings

manipulate the planet, fellow humans, and other creatures as the object

and scrim for their own desire and purposes, while being themselves

remade in the process. Hybridization and intermixing, in Fay’s view,

are the primary “engines” of change, in human and natural history

alike, as species, environments, and cultures are continually modified

by the introduction of new peoples, organisms, ideas, and ways of doing

things. Art critic John Yau suggests that such an integrative view of

humankind’s place as an inseparable part of the planet’s biosphere can

be seen as influenced by the Taoist tradition, an ancient Chinese

philosophical and religious system of thought, “which proposes that

humans are but one aspect of the broad spectrum of nature.” [15]

Consonant with the ethos of Taoism that regards humankind as creatures

of nature, Fay looks upon humanity as an integral constituent of life

on this planet, and human action as an inherent form of natural

activity. In his art Fay alludes to different registers of human

intervention in transforming the world, and his relationship to those

processes, large and small, which he perceives as naturally occurring

events. Pointing to sites like Shanghai and Hong Kong he suggests how,

on a grand scale, whole societies and cultures are complexly recast

through processes set in motion by outside human intervention. Having

emerged from a restless, polyglot urban environment, the artist equally

sees himself as a result of those processes: he’s a hybrid Chinese

because of the historic actions of the British.

Like botanists and naturalists who both catalog and produce new

species, Fay also intervenes in the world by gathering “specimens” and

reworking nature’s forms to generate previously unknown varieties

through his art. Among Ming Fay’s current projects is Money Tree &

Monkey Pots: An Installation of Montalvo Specimens (2004), a fanciful

environmental piece incorporating living trees on the Montalvo estate

in Saratoga, California. One of several indoor and outdoor works

created in response to a site housing an extensive private collection

of exotic plants and trees, this project introduces a new “species”

into the garden, suggested by an actual plant form: the monkey pot, a

tree indigenous to the tropical jungles of the Amazon. The name refers

to the tree’s large, gourd-shaped fruits that attract passing monkeys

whose heads often become lodged in their recesses, in the act of

gorging on their delectable seeds. Fay first encountered the monkey

pot in the Singapore Botanic Gardens, located in a city founded by the

British in the early nineteenth century at the tip of the Malay

Peninsula. Like other major hubs of commercial activity such as Hong

Kong and New York, it began as one of a series of trading posts

established around the world by competing Western European nations that

were designed to pump wealth into the mother countries. This experience

led Fay to ponder the extent to which “The British Empire changed the

world. They sent botanists all over, transplanting seeds everywhere.”

[17] The presence of the monkey pot so far from its geographical

origins, thus became emblematic for the artist of the circulation of

botanical items throughout the Empire in the scientific pursuit of

commercial applications. By extension, the international transfer of

these plants also reflects the way that the biodiversity of Asia,

Africa, and especially the Americas have historically served as a

critical resource for the amassing of vast fortunes by Western

interests in the post-Columbian age, based on the cultivation of

different crops, including coffee, rubber, cotton, cocoa, sugar,

potatoes, spices, and rubber.

Following such reasoning, Fay began to envision himself as a “Field

Scientist/Artist,”

who in his own way has sought to discover unknown species, transplant

them to new environments, and graft them with indigenous plants to

produce new varieties. Having spent time under British rule, he

metaphorically inserts himself into the process by which eighteenth and

nineteenth-century botanists like the famous British naturalist and

explorer Sir Joseph Banks, traveled the world gathering rare specimens

for study and cross-breeding in government-sponsored botanical gardens.

In a notable departure from other bodies of work in which the

simulated fruits and vegetables are meticulously rendered, here Fay’s

translations of spiky “trees” and bulbous “fruits” not only have a

roughly assembled quality, but also are coated in shimmering,

otherworldly colors reminiscent of submerged corals in an oceanic

forest, imparting an aura that is simultaneously seductive and

unsettling. While obviously still based on the morphology of flora,

their skeins of dense paint, chunks of pigmented foam, and gauze

layered over partially exposed wire frameworks overtly call attention

to the process of their creation, stressing the artist’s role as an

agent of human intervention in the natural world.

What began as an exploration of culturally resonant vegetable and plant

forms as inspirations for his sculpture, has since evolved into a

larger personal metaphor, as Ming Fay increasingly viewed himself as a

product of the same generative, hybridizing forces that continually

remake the fabric of the world at all levels. The artist declares:

“It’s all invention. You think I’m Chinese? Yes, I’m Chinese, but

I’ve been in New York longer than I have been in China. So this is who

I am and that’s what you can describe my work [as being]. It’s the

person that’s behind it. It’s not a pure substance; I’m a mixed hybrid

person, one of a kind.” [16] (interview)

Work like that of Ming Fay’s foreground the circumstances of many in

today’s world for whom linear narratives of migration and settlement

are incapable of containing their experience, in which cultures of

origin and (often multiple) points of migration remain part of a

wide-ranging circuit they continue to travel, both physically and

psychically. They likewise illuminate different ways in which

contemporary Asian immigrants conceive of themselves both in relation

to the ancient histories of their homelands and to the historical

processes have drawn Asians to journey around the world. In recent

times, some critics have employed the term “transexperience” attributed

to the late Chinese artist Chen Zhen, to speak of the ways that

contemporary diasporic experience and cultural identifications are

adaptive, fluid, and continually being reconfigured in different

contexts. However it must be emphasized that positing Asian diasporic

identities as dynamic and constantly in flux does not mean that

identities are not impacted by points of origin. Ming Fay, for

instance, who is fluent in the visual languages and methodologies of

modernism, grew up in a cosmopolitan Asian environment already suffused

by Western cultures and influences. Yet by his own account, the artist

nonetheless remains strongly aware of, and seeks to assert, his

standpoint perspective as a Chinese living in the West by activating

connections to his Asian cultural heritage through art.

Such an approach demonstrates that framing the world through a

culturally specific filter need not be an excuse for nostalgia, or a

fixed referent for romantic or atavistic notions of authenticity, but

instead can serve as a compelling epistemic resource for dealing with

an ever-changing present. Staking claims to knowledge with a particular

cultural-historical provenance can provide a mooring point from which

to extend outward into the modern world, while also alluding to

cross-connections and assertions of commonalities in human experience

and desire. Such conversations not only bring forward different layers

of meaning, but also (to follow Ming Fay’s use of a “scientific”

metaphor) make us all “fellow investigators” gathering evidence and

following clues that allow for multifaceted insights about the

historical moment we share.