Post-Marijuana, Sand Script

2013

Through his radical deconstruction and reinvention of traditional calligraphic forms, Fung Ming Chip has created more than one hundred unique script styles. The artist first writes with water on a blank sheet of paper; the characters become visible only after he applies a layer of dark ink over it. Where the water has saturated the paper, the ink is only partially absorbed, leaving enigmatic traces of characters that float on the surface of the composition. In this painting, the play of light focuses the viewer’s attention on the images as they ebb and flow in rhythmic pulsating layers of ink, emphasizing the visual experience rather than the meaning of the text. A self-taught calligrapher, Fung is the rare artist who carves his own seals and then uses them in unconventional ways to frame the abstracted calligraphic forms in his paintings. Two of his seals are on view in the adjacent display case, on the “Life of a Scholar.”