Fung Mingchip 馮明秋

Fung Ming Chip (b. 1951) was born in Guangdong Province of China and raised in Hong Kong. After staying in New York and Taipei, he is now living and working in Hong Kong. Fung mainly works with calligraphy and seal carving. He is also a writer of essays, fictions, and poems. Fung began carving seals in 1975. He holds the view that seals should be an art form independent from its impression-making function.

To free seal carving from its functional purposes, Fung altered the structure of Chinese characters, compositions, the surface texture of woodblocks, and the materiality of seals. Since 1996, Fung has been devoting himself to calligraphy. By inventing new scripts, he invites viewers to expand their understanding of calligraphy on various fronts, including time, space, lines, and conceptual framings. Up until now, the artist has invented more than one hundred scripts.

Fung’s works have been collected by a number of major art institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, USA; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, USA; Harvard University Art Museum, Cambridge, MA, USA; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ, USA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University, England; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; White Rabbit Collection, Sydney, Australia; Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, Los Angeles, USA, among others. Fung held a major solo retrospective at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 1999. He was artist in residence at Cambridge University in 2004. In 2008, Hermes invited Fung to create a tableware pattern titled “Les Poemes du Mandarin”.

Submitted by Fu Qiumeng Fine Art