As a self-described botanist of sorts, the artist Ming Fay spent his career cultivating his own sort of vegetation—pears, oranges, peaches, and plums; peppers, pea pods, and nuts, each peculiarly whopping in its proportion. Just as all plants reflect the composition of their soil, Fay’s were the product of his taking root in New York. Born in 1943 to artists in Shanghai and educated in Hong Kong, he went on to study art in the Midwest and California, sculpting burly structures from steel. The chastened circumstances he encountered in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where he relocated in 1973, forced him to seek out cheaper media, such as the discarded newspapers he layered over wire armatures. (The method was the same he used to craft kites and lanterns in his childhood.) Eventually, Fay befriended other immigrants and artists, finding inspiration, too, in the crates of produce lining Canal. The profusion of brick and concrete moved him to the realization that he was living “out of nature”—and that he could reimmerse himself through art.
Fay, who died in March, had a keen sense that magic lived amid the mundane. This may have accounted for the whimsy conjured in Midnite Porridge (named for an art journal that Fay kept in the mid- to late 1980s) at the Chelsea gallery Kurimanzutto, the work irrepressible even on a darkening November day. There I imagined that the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, who described how art should “defamiliarize” us from the world so that we can reencounter it with fresh perspective, might have appreciated Fay. Rather than “make the stone stony,” as Shklovsky put it, Fay’s sculptures have the effect of rendering a pear pearish: not just one fruit crammed among many but a bizarre conjunction of textures, tones, and curvatures, details enhanced by exaggerated scale and isolation. Nestled between these identifiable specimens were other, fictitious forms, “hybrids” designed after existing species: Edge Wing (1998) seems foraged from an untrodden clearing, as if Fay discovered the strange offspring of a chestnut and a rusted circular-saw blade.
Pausing to contemplate them, I was struck by a sudden and irrational surge of affection, the kind I typically reserve for entities with a pulse. Perched aslant on a plinth, Cherry (1993) met me at eye level, as if poised to engage in conversation; its tilted posture and gently arched stem suggested silent inquisition, an almost undeniable autonomy. Exiting the gallery, I climbed the stairs to the High Line, on whose tracks meat and produce were once conveyed. In theory, the elevated park is softer than all the brick and concrete below, yet the foliage was trimmed into uniformity and the lawn cordoned off by rope—effectively preventing tread-induced damage but also more illuminating kinds of contact.
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