Fung Ming Chip at Art Asia Miami 2011
Nov 30 – Dec 4, 2011, opens at 11.00 am
Booth D29, SCOPE / ART ASIA Pavilion in Midtown Miami
Booth D29
Scope/Art Asia Pavilion
NE 1st Avenue and NE 30th Street,
Midtown Miami
www.crimsongate.com

Crimson Gate Fine Art is excited to present a solo exhibition of the work of celebrated Chinese artist Fung Ming Chip during Art Basel Week at Booth D29 in the Scope/Art Asia pavilion located at NE 1st Avenue and NE 30th Street in Midtown Miami. The exhibition will feature a broad selection of the artist’s stunning contemporary ink-on-paper calligraphy and carved wooden seals.

Fung Ming Chip was born in a small village in Guandong province in 1951 and immigrated to the US in 1977. While living in New York City he developed an interest in Western abstract art, the influence of which was to be crucial to the artist’s own exploration of, and modern take on, traditional Chinese artistic practice and theory. Despite being entirely self-taught, and receiving only a primary school education, Fung’s influence on Chinese artistic tradition, and its reciprocal impact on his own life, has been dramatic. In the artist’s own words “By reviving the traditions of seal carving and calligraphy, and successfully reframing them within a contemporary context, my own destiny has been transformed.”

Fung’s passionate commitment to his work began with seal-carving, which he took up while recuperating from a serious illness. His seals, exaggerated in size, celebrate the carving itself rather than the print it produces. The seals are elevated from tool of the printing process to finished work of art in a distinctly contemporary twist on tradition. Presented as red and white textured blocks, the seal’s carved characters, finished in red acrylic, appear animated, almost in motion, against the blocks white relief.

The artist began working with calligraphy as a way to improve and expand his seal carving technique. He quickly embraced calligraphy on its own merits and set about developing script styles that, while paying tribute to tradition, are striking in their modernism. His work in ink on xuan paper evokes a lightness of motion and a harmonized temporal balance which is echoed in the primitivism of the medium, the deceptive simplicity of the scripts and characters, and the Zen-inspired poetry which permeates much of the work. The calligraphy pieces vary greatly in size and orientation with some being as large as 12 feet wide. Fung’s commitment to developing new approaches to one the world’s oldest forms of artistic expression continues to produce a startling range of work that is fresh, exciting, and often iconoclastic while also remaining thoroughly respectful of the traditions informing the work at its most fundamental level. As critic Paul Serfaty puts it, “Fung Ming C
hip’s calligraphy opens the heart of Chinese culture to the modern world.”

It is Fung Ming Chip’s awareness of the empathetic relationship between the modern and ancient elements inherent in his work that makes it appealing to a wide array of collectors. His work sits in some of the world’s most significant private collections and in such major public galleries as Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

In addition to being a carver of seals and a writer of calligraphy, Fung Ming Chip is also a sculptor, poet, and essayist and has created beautiful tableware designs for Hermes. He has also served as artist-in-residence at Cambridge University. He spends his time between Hong Kong, Taiwan, and New York City.

Crimson Gate Fine Art specializes in fine art and antiquities from throughout Asia.

Fung Ming Chip – Solo Exhibition
Crimson Gate Fine Art at Art Asia Miami, Booth D29
Nov 29 6pm – 9pm Vernissage
Nov 30-Dec 3 11am – 7pm Open to public
Dec 4 11am – 6pm Open to public