Abstract Evolutions: Sixty Years of Paintings by Fong Chung-Ray
With an artistic career spanning six decades, Fong Chung-Ray (b. 1933) is an early pioneer of contemporary Chinese art. The recent retrospective held at the University Museum and Art Gallery (UMAG) at the University of Hong Kong is the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the city. It brings together over half a century of work by the nonagenarian San Francisco Bay Area–based master. The exhibition showcases fifty paintings, the majority of which are borrowed from private collections in Asia, alongside a small number of recent works lent by the artist.
Arranged chronologically, the exhibition spreads across UMAG’s first-floor galleries in four segments. The first presents works from the beginnings of the artist’s career. In the early 1960s, Fong was a member of the Taiwanese modernist art group Fifth Moon Society (1956–1972), which sought to modernize Chinese painting by incorporating Western abstraction. In 1963, two years after joining the group, Fong made the decision to shift from oils to ink painting. His early explorations in ink are characterized by loose, calligraphic forms painted with ink and acrylics. Fong used not only traditional ink brushes but also ones he made himself from rolled palm leaves. The latter allowed him to create unique brushstrokes and textures that became his signature style. The earliest example of this is 1964-52 (1964), a horizontal ink-and-colour-on-paper painting. A single calligraphic brushstroke sweeps across the surface, against a soft background of feathery strokes in light and dark brown rendered with the palm-leaf brush. By contrast, in a later piece, the acrylic-on-paper 1974-66 (1974), forceful, dark brushstrokes are layered over saturated washes and strokes of warm orange-red that dominate the entire composition, highlighted by strokes of white. During this period, Fong experimented with a wide range of colours, from earthy, subdued tones of brown, grey, and blue to vivid hues of green and red. A fine example of the latter is the acrylic-on-paper 1975-28 (1975), in which lithe, quick brushstrokes of black and shades of verdant green convey vibrance and spontaneity. These early pieces display the artist’s talent and sophistication as a colourist.
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1964-52
By Fong Chong-ray (b. 1933); 1964
Ink and Color on Paper
58.4 x 116.8 cm
Private collection
In 1971, Fong received a grant from the John D. Rockefeller III Foundation to travel across Europe and the United States. His exposure to European and American artistic trends of the time influenced his aesthetic sensibilities. This led him to develop his own visual language, drawing from Chinese painting and modern Western art while unrestrained by the boundaries of either. ‘I felt that the difference between Eastern art and Western art should lie in the spirit, and that it was unimportant to stress the difference in form’, he has reflected (Fong, 2015, p. 7). In 1975, a few years after his stint abroad, Fong immigrated to the United States, settling in San Francisco. The change in environment prompted a shift in style. He started to paint on canvas again and adopted acrylic paints, which have similar qualities to ink, allowing him to blend colours seamlessly. By this time, he had already participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Taiwan and abroad, garnering recognition for his unique interpretation of and abstract take on Chinese painting. His compositions became bolder and more confident, his brushstrokes more individualistic and dynamic, and his colour combinations more daring and expressive. The second section of the exhibition contains pieces from this period. The acrylic-on-canvas 1984-8 (1984) generates a feel of pure lyrical abstraction. It is composed of calligraphic brushstrokes layered on top of broad, fluid washes of white, grey, and pale blue. A streak of red lies beneath the white, and next to it is a short, single smear of bright pea-green. By contrast, there are hints of imagery from the Chinese landscape painting tradition in the acrylic-on-canvas 1982-73 (1982). It evokes an abstract snowscape with flecks of snow on a mustard-yellow mountain, set against a plain background painted pale grey.
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1984-8
By Fong Chong-ray (b. 1933); 1984
Acrylic on canvas;
91.5 x 122 cm
Private collection
The third section unfolds in the next room, which showcases examples of the artist’s oeuvre from the 1990s to the early 2010s. In the early 1990s, Fong introduced collage and paper cutting into his creative process, layering paint and torn fragments of paper on canvas to create multilayered effects. These works represent a marked break from his early ink and acrylic landscape paintings to ones that engage completely with abstraction. About the change in direction, the artist recalled, ‘Even though this type of ink painting was charming, I needed to move beyond it’ (Pan, 2022, p. 146), and ‘painting cannot forever circulate within the realm of tradition, . . . there must be breakthroughs, new emergences’ (Pan, 2022, p. 156). During this period the artist became deeply inspired by Buddhism as a means for self-cultivation. He began to incorporate text from Buddhist scriptures into his art. An early example is the mixed-media-on-canvas 1991-17 (1991), which layers paper fragments cut with hard edges, some bearing written text, with saturated washes of grey and brown. As he honed his language of collage, Fong forged an elaborate method that involved applying acrylic onto plastic sheets and then transferring the resulting patterns or text to the painting surface. He also replaced the hard paper edges with hand-torn fragments, unifying the discrete fragments into one, as in 2008-16 (2008). Here, the accumulation of torn papers, warm golden-brown tones, tiny scratch marks, and crackled fissures create the impression of old, dilapidated walls and cracked, parched earth. This “aesthetic of decay” has been a distinguishing feature in his oeuvre ever since. Indeed, the tactile nature of each of the works in this section, largely rendered in warm, earthy tones of brown, green, and brick red, entices our eye to linger and marvel at their diverse textures and contemplate their complex layered meanings.
The fourth and final section of the exhibition presents works executed in the last decade, representing the artist’s most recent creative evolution. The paintings are impressive, very large-scale compositions, proving that even in Fong’s advanced age, his ambition and experimental spirit have not waned but grown. These latest works prominently incorporate Buddhist texts, such as the acrylic-on-canvas 2022-5-20 (2022), a monumental piece measuring six metres in width, which is inscribed with passages from the Vimalakirti Sutra. Using the aforementioned transfer method, large, squarely-composed characters are interwoven with small characters against a grey-beige background. The characters, written with an unpolished, childlike simplicity, convey directness in expression, unburdened by orthodoxy or convention. In another large-scale canvas measuring five metres in width, 2020-12-31 (2020), Fong juxtaposes fragments of written characters with transferred characters, enhancing the visual interest.
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2022-5-20
By Fong Chong-ray (b. 1933); 2022
Acrylic on canvas
177.8 x 609.5 cm
Collection of the Artist
In addition to Buddhist texts, Fong has also worked with oracle bone script—as seen on 2017-8-22 (2017)—augmenting the feeling of antiquity in the decayed aesthetic of the painting’s surface. In other works, Fong has added bold compositional elements, such as crisscrossing white lines in 2018-11-30 (2018) and 2021-9-27 (2021), which are suggestive of aerial landscape views or maps and add an additional layer of complexity. While he continues to favour earthy tones, he has also added vibrant and eye-catching colours to his palette, such as the intense orange in 2020-12-10 (2020) and the contrasting patches of orange and turquoise in 2021-9-27 (2021).
From the beginning of his artistic career in Taiwan to the present day in California, Fong Chung-Ray has pursued his practice with steadfast conviction to innovate and experiment. Through groundbreaking paintings thoughtfully grouped together, this is a generous, compelling retrospective that encapsulates the show’s title, ‘Abstract Evolutions’. Fong has lived in the United States for nearly fifty years, so his (re)introduction in Asia has been fairly recent. This exhibition demonstrates the curatorial team’s ambition to present a comprehensive survey of the artist’s career. Together with a catalogue that includes informed essays by leading scholars, these efforts will be especially inspiring to audiences who previously have had little chance to see Fong’s artworks in person.
Olivia Wang is an independent curator and writer based in Hong Kong. All photos courtesy of the artist and Galerie du Monde.
References
Fong Chung-Ray, ‘Memories and Reflections’, in Fong Chung-Ray: A Retrospective, Guangzhou, 2015, p. 7.
Pan An-Yi, Transcending Fragments: Fong Chung-Ray’s Artistic Journey, Taipei, 2022, pp. 146, 156.
This article featured in our September/October 2024 print issue.
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