Ming Fay, Artist of Whimsical Sculptural Gardens, Dies at 82

Shanghai-born artist and longtime educator Ming Fay, whose whimsical sculptures of organic forms and immersive garden installations illuminated the bond between humans and the natural world, died at the age of 82 on February 23 at his home in New York City. The news of his death was announced at the end of last month by his studio, which has been managed by his son, Parker Fay, for the last decade. 

Over the course of a five-decade career, Fay used large-scale sculpture to blur the lines between fantasy and reality, drawing from his familial Chinese heritage and the Western influences that shaped his upbringing. He explored concepts relating to horticulture, energy flow, and local mythology through imaginative world-building and vibrant garden and jungle installations that incorporated his personal daily observations, documented in a collection of found objects that included fruits, seeds, and bones.

Born in Shanghai in 1943 to artist parents, Fay was raised in Hong Kong, where he and his family moved amid the rise of Mao Zedong’s regime in China. His mother taught him the technique of papier-mâche, which set the stage for what would later become one of his signature mediums. Fay also cited the surrealist sculptures of Chinese folklore in Hong Kong’s now-defunct Tiger Balm Garden as inspiration for his later installation works in a 2022 interview with ArtAsiaPacific.

“The garden has remained a throughline of my entire artistic career. I see the concept of a garden as a symbol of abundance, paradise, and the location for the ultimate, desirable state of being,” he told the publication. 

At 18 years old, Fay moved to the United States, embarking on a two-week-long boat voyage to study at the Columbus College of Art and Design, where he received a full scholarship. Driven by an interest in sculpture, he ultimately transferred to the Kansas City Art Institute, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and later received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In 1973, Fay moved to New York City, settling in a studio loft on Canal Street in Chinatown. Inspired by the neighborhood’s fruit market stands, he began making sculptures based on these daily observations using newspapers he found on the street, his son Parker Fay told Hyperallergic. 

“He was interested in the symbolism — in Chinese culture, pears represent prosperity, oranges represent good luck, and cherries represent love,” Parker Fay explained. “But as a sculptor, he was also interested in the shape, form, texture, and color.”

In 1982, Ming Fay and five Hong Kong and Chinese artists founded the Epoxy Art Group — an experimental collective based on exploring the members’ glued East Asian and American experiences. Active until 1992, the group offered support for the city’s Chinese American artists, staging collaborative group shows in New York and in Hong Kong that often focused on social and political commentary. These included the outdoor slide show Erotica (1981), which projected bodily images onto the side of a building at the intersection of Spring Street and Broadway; and 36 Tactics (1987), which referenced the ancient Chinese military stratagems and consisted of collaged 36 photocopied images and news headlines commenting on the Cold War, Mao regime, and US-China military relations. The group’s works are in the collections of both the New Museum and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University.

In addition to his active participation in Lower Manhattan’s arts community, Fay had a lengthy career as an arts educator, teaching sculpture at various institutions including William Paterson University and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) until he retired in 2016.

“Ming was more than an artist-in-residence, more than my mentor. He was a witness, a guide, a keeper of wisdom who saw the value in my work and urged me to keep digging, to unearth what lay beneath the surface,” wrote the artist and MICA alumnus Desmond Beach in an Instagram post in tribute to the late artist.

Fay’s works are held in private and public collections across the globe, including the Brooklyn Museum, New Museum, Taipei Fine Art Museum, and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. It  is also on permanent display in several public sites across the United States, such as the Delancey-Essex Street subway station in Manhattan, home to his glass fish mosaic “Shad Crossing, Delancey Orchard” (2004), and the entrance to PS7 in Elmhurst Queens, adorned by his bronze leaf gate sculpture “Leaf Gate, Keys in Flight, Seed of Elm, The Spirit of the Elm, and Elm in Bloom Sprouting Buds” (1995).

This spring, 100 of Fay’s sculptures will go on display as part of the major retrospective Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden, which opens on June 26 at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Fay is survived by his son, his sister Mun Fay, and his partner Bian Hong.