Anyone who enters the New York City subway on Derance Street will notice an impressive mosaic portrait of a fish head inserted into the white tiled wall of the station. Adjacent to gold in shades of pink, purple and blue, they are on ancient coins, but with a whimsical air, they give their rainbow subjects all the majesty of a king or queen.
Commuters continuing downstairs to board the F train discover three giant shads covering one wall and a mosaic covering an elegant cherry orchard on the wall.
Ending in 2004, these mosaics are perhaps the most visible public artwork of sculptor Min Fey, who passed away on February 23rd at his Manhattan home. He was 82 years old.
His son, Parker Faye, confirmed his death, said the cause was a heart event.
Faye's public art was inspired by the place's history and natural environment. His first installation at the 7Q public school in Elmhurst, Queens in 1995 included a giant bronze gate shaped like an elm leaf. For the Whitehall Ferry Terminal in downtown Manhattan, he designed a canoe-shaped granite bench, paying tribute to the Native Americans who once crossed by boat from Staten Island to Manhattan.
Delancey Street Shad nodded to indigenous fish, a declining population, and metro riders bound to Brooklyn to pass through the water soon. Faye generally did not work in the mosaics. These were his first ones assembled by a team of experts.
Otherwise, Shad was the epitome of his practice. It is an overlooked feature of nature, which he created magically and inevitable by expanding it to human scale.
For over 50 years, in a series of studios in Chinatown, Manhattan. Dumbo in Brooklyn. Jersey City, New Jersey. And until he moved further down Broadway in 2013, in his home above Strand bookstore near Union Square in Manhattan, Mr. Faye created huge, vegetables, shells, wishbones and semi-imagining “hybrid” objects with the signed technology of painted nipple marchers.
In his work, Western techniques and influences gave a somewhat romantic view of China's symbolism and the natural urban area. Many of his works were inspired by the vast collection of seeds, nuts and other natural objects he had been given or picked up over the years.
Written for the New York Times in 1991, Michael Brenson described Fay's papier-maid wishbones, walnuts and conch as “a distant relative of Claise Aldenburg's giant fruit, Tony Crag's giant shell, and the organic figure abstraction of Robert Serien.”
But they weren't all. In a pamphlet at the 1998 exhibition, poet and critic John Yau proposed that there is something revolutionary about the combination of intercultural materials.
“Instead of breaking down barriers to art and culture, like Flavin, Warhol and others did,” Yau wrote.
Ming Gi Fay was born in Shanghai on February 2, 1943, and both were artists. After relocating to Hong Kong in 1952, his father worked as a set designer, while his mother taught painting. She also taught her son to make paper lanterns and kits.
In addition to his son who manages the studio, Fay was survived by his sister Man Fey and his partner, artist Bian Hong. His marriage to Pui Lee Chang ended with a divorce.
Speaking to WP, a magazine at William Patterson University, Fay, a tenured professor of sculpture, recalled that during his annual recovery from appendicitis, his interest in art awakened while he was locked in bed as a child.
“All I had to look at was a picture book,” he said. “In the meantime I read everything from master painting books to comic books. That was my spiritual healing.”
When he was 18, Fay was offered a full scholarship to Columbus College of Art & Design in Ohio, where he was one of the first Asian students. He chose design as a more practical path than fine art at his father's prompting, and later praised its training in some of his successes in the Public Commission's landing.
Before he completed his degree, however, he fell in love with sculpture and moved to the Kansas City Art Institute, where he made large-scale geometric works in Steel in 1967 and earned a Bachelor of Art in 1967.
In 1972, Fay moved to New York and first landed in a loft on Canal Street near Chinatown Market, which was filled with interesting produce. At that time he switched from geometric steel to figic papier-mat.
“In my early New York era, when I was living in a loft with very limited resources for sculpture materials,” he later recalled.
The first thing he created was a giant pear, a symbol of traditional Chinese prosperity. Over the years, he also used and painted spray foam, wax and ceramics. He then moved from creating individual objects to creating whole environments like gardens and jungle.
Finding a community in New York was a struggle and there were few opportunities for Asian artists. Eventually, Fay became friends with other artists – among them, Tessing Fusier, Chakaia Booker and David Diao began hosting a noisy dinner party. In 1982 he and half a dozen other Chinese artists formed the epoxy art group. This used news clipping and Xerox machines to conduct political activities based on multipart research, including “36 Tactics” (1987) and “Decolonization of Hong Kong” (1992).
In addition to teaching at William Patterson, Faye was a visiting professor at the Reinhardt School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He also took a semester break from his own MFA program to teach at the University of Hong Kong in China. His works were collected, among other institutions, by the Brooklyn Museum in Wisconsin and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, and exhibited in Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and around the United States. In New York he was represented by Alisan art.
Speaking to the 2012 Times, Fay described his unusual artistic path as a response to his environment and a way to heal himself and others.
“I'm an urban guy, an urban boy,” he said. “In the Midwest, there was a wealth of nature. In New York, I felt isolated and divided from nature. At the time I was looking for something to do.”
He added: “I felt nature was an interesting place. It was a kind of calling.”
