MING FAY: MONEY TREE & MONKEY POTS

AN INSTALLATION OF MONTALVO SPECIMENS

I cast myself as a Field Scientist/Artist who discovers magical plants:

[I specialize] in the collection of plant specimens that are endowed by humans

with auspicious meaning.1

New York based Chinese artist Ming Fay creates fantastic gardens with gargantuan vegetation – cherries as big as coconuts, silver dollars the size of dinner plates, and monkey pots as large as watermelons. Like a fanciful naturalist or horticulturalist, Fay’s rare species are based on actual plant forms but presented in ways that make them seem exotic and unfamiliar. The artist combines Eastern and Western philosophies and vegetation to pose questions about our complex and often ambiguous relationship with nature. His colorful installations, made of lightweight materials of paper, wire, synthetic fibers, foam and acrylic, are suspended to become floating landscapes that engulf us, redirecting our sense of the world and our place in it.

Over the last three decades, Fay has focused on the botanical world as a metaphor for human desire. He explains, “Human desire is manifested through the natural elements.” The garden, with its implication of growth and decay, reflects the cycles of life. Fay’s magical gardens also reflect Taoist thought and an understanding of nature as a symbolizing power capable of affecting the future.2 Chinese symbolism and lore along with the artist's own personal inventiveness inform his enormous hybrid plants. With its glittering cascade of abundant yellow leaves or coins, the golden money tree embodies our desire for prosperity, while the voluptuous red cherries suggest amorous desire and sexual ripeness, and the peach intimations of immortality.

Created on a scale to match human dimension, Fay’s organic forms also express a non-hierarchal world where humanity melds with nature. Writer John Yau notes: “Influenced by Taoism which proposes that humans are but one aspect of the broad spectrum of nature, Fay uses art to embody his beliefs about the relationship of humankind to the world we inhabit.”3 Such imagery relates to traditional Chinese landscape painting that depicts man, if at all, as a tiny figure almost lost in the landscape. This vision is in stark contrast to the biblical tradition in the West, which places man above nature, in dominion over all life. Having spent much of his life in the West, Fay’s work bridges both cultures by proposing a more harmonious relationship with nature. Influenced by the premise he found in The Botany of Desire, that plants have evolved by exploiting human ingenuity and intervention, the artist’s work reflects the implication of this theory – humanity is but an element in the continuum of nature.

When Montalvo invited the artist to create new work in the gallery and on the grounds, Fay was inspired by the extraordinary trees and flora planted nearly a century ago by Senator James Duval Phelan. He commented:

Montalvo is such a special place with the grounds and the villa. I see the opportunity of approaching the site as a naturalist/artist collector searching for unknown species of plants and transplanting a new species, the monkey pot, to Montalvo, adding to Senator Phelan’s collection of exotic plants [which he cultivated] to fit his desires, and to serve his needs.

Fay notes the role this impulse – to seek out new species of plants and transplant known species to a new geographic area – has yielded throughout history. ”The British Empire changed the world. They sent botanists all over, transplanting seeds everywhere. They created the best botanical gardens in the world.”

For his installation at Montalvo, Fay will introduce the monkey pot, a fruit originally from the Amazon but transplanted to the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. The name of the fruit refers to its pot-like shape that holds a seed so enticing to monkeys that their heads often become stuck in the fruit as they try to obtain it. The monkey pots and their seeds become “a loaded metaphor for getting caught up in our desires.”

Fay will install his rare indigo monkey pots onto trees on the Montalvo grounds. Guided by a map available in the gallery, visitors will be invited to discover the monkey pots on site. Inside the gallery, a garden will flourish with freshly grafted forms of the golden money tree, fruits and exotic flora, bearing the promise of the fulfillment of our desires. Fay explains, “My sculptural oeuvre includes the Tree of Life and its variations as a source of inspiration. I am currently grafting different trees into one, creating a new species of the magical tree which bears miraculous ideas as its fruit.”

Born in Shanghai in 1943, Fay lives in New York and teaches at William Paterson University (New Jersey). Fay received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute (1967) and his MFA from the University of California in Santa Barbara (1970). He has been awarded numerous public art commissions, and has exhibited nationally in major museums and galleries as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Michele Rowe-Shields

Visual Arts Director

Notes:

1 Ming Fay, conversations with author over period of November 2003 – February 2004. All subsequent artist quotes are from these conversations.

2 John Yau, The Garden of Earthly Delights: The Work of Ming Fay (New York, NY: The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, 1998).

3 Ibid.