"Fung Ming Chip takes a unique and revolutionary approach to calligraphy and seal carving, the most hallowed of the traditional Chinese visual arts. Brashly he pulls them apart to examine their fundamentals. (To say he deconstructs them seems too disengaged to describe his process.) Focusing on those art forms' basic, essential characteristics, he produces extraordinary explorative works of art that illuminate their nature. The unceasing inventiveness of Fung Ming Chip's works cast a fresh light on ancient art forms, even as superficially they seem too stray afar."
- Britta Erickson
Fung Ming Chip
A self-taught artist who has been active as a sculptor, photographer, playwright, poet, and seal carver as well as calligrapher, Fung Ming Chip has excavated new layers of conceptual and structural freedom within seal carving and calligraphy’s organic terrain of word and form. Guangdong, China, Fung moved to Hong Kong as a child. Upon completing primary school, he began to work. In 1977 he moved to New York and encountered the world of art.
Since ancient times, the seal’s vermillion impression served as a signature of authenticity. Fung changed the medium from stone to wood, then enlarging the size, the seal itself rather than the impression it left, became an independent art form. To improve his seal carving, he practiced calligraphy.
“What is calligraphy?” Fung concluded that calligraphy is an art of time and space, and therefore is closer to music and dance than to Chinese literature. Using his original compositions, key words or Buddhist scripture as the text, the structure of the character became the choreography for the brush. He has gone on to create over 100 different calligraphy script styles.
Among his many international exhibitions, Fung had a major retrospective of his works at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 1999. He was artist in residence at Cambridge University, and has work included in major private collections and public institutions. In 2008 he created Les Poemes du Mandarin tableware pattern for Hermes. He currently resides in Hong Kong.
Selected Public and Private Collections
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, USA
Harvard University Art Museum,
Cambridge, MA, USA
Princeton University Art Gallery,
Princeton, NJ, USA
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University, England
Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
White Rabbit Collection, Sydney, Australia
Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, China
