Fung Ming Chip is a self-taught artist committed to creating new ways of engaging with Chinese calligraphy and seal carving. His artistry is as rooted in Chinese tradition, training, and discipline as it is experimental and conceptually contemporary. Fung’s calculated formal risks resonate with his dedication to innovating the art forms; indeed, he takes certain risks because he can execute them with technical mastery. But these deliberate aesthetic choices also signal the prismatic lens through which he views his own complex engagement with these mediums as a contemporary artist.

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He was born in 1951, in Guangdong, China, and raised in Hong Kong. In 1977 he moved to New York. A hand scroll of calligraphy by 11th century artist, Mi Fu, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art changed his life. Within a few years, Fung devoted himself entirely to his art. Explorations of continuity and transformation lay at the core of his art practice.

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For Fung, calligraphy is an art of time, space, and movement and, therefore, is closer to music and dance than to Chinese literature. The structure of the character becomes the choreography for his brush. In his pursuit to offer new approaches to the ever-changing art of calligraphy, he has created more than one hundred different original calligraphy script styles.

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Among his many international exhibitions, Fung had a major solo retrospective at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 1999. He was artist in residence at Cambridge University, and his work is included in major private and institutional collections around the world. He has been active as a painter, photographer, playwright, sculptor and poet. In 2008 he created Les Poemes du Mandarin tableware pattern for Hermes. He currently resides in Hong Kong.

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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