Fong Chung-Ray

Fong Chung-Ray (Chinese: 馮鍾睿; born November 6, 1934) is a Chinese artist regarded as one of the pioneers of abstraction in Chinese painting.

At the age of 14, Fong Chung-Ray was obliged to leave his family and go into exile, due to the Chinese Civil War when he enlisted as a lieutenant in the navy. As the army moved to different locations and various political events occurred, he settled in Taiwan in 1949.

Fong Chung-Ray's passion for art and inquiring mind led him to take an interest in Western abstract art, which he discovered through reading journals and books, available in the American Library in Taipei.^[1] In 1957, he founded the Four Seas Artists Association with his friend, Hu Chi-Chung. During this period, he experimented with abstraction and used new Western techniques, such as painting with oil on canvas. In 1961, he became a member of the Wuyue Group (Fifth Moon Group) and participated in many exhibitions. in 1963, on the advice of Liu Guosong, a painter and the Group’s theorist, he abandoned painting with oil on canvas and returned to the traditional Chinese technique of ink painting. Fong Chung-Ray then invented a brush made from palm tree fibres, which added a highly personal touch and a rougher quality to his sweeps of colour.^[1] The abstract ink works from this period, with their blend of subtle colouring, dynamic strokes, wet sweeps of colour, and poetry, were rooted directly in the tradition of the Chinese master landscape painters.

In 1971, he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation grant that enabled him to travel to Europe and the united States.^[2] When he settled in San Francisco in 1975,^[2] he began to work with acrylic paint. Initially, his work focused on abstract landscapes, but he gradually moved away from this movement when he turned to Buddhist spirituality. This fresh source of inspiration resulted in a more abstract approach, related to temporality, which he studied in the sacred texts.

The effects of time on materials and an exploration of the technique of collages and imprints have become fundamental aspects of his artistic approach. By going beyond the formal representation of nature, Fong Chung-Ray has revived the spiritual essence that emanates from the paintings by the great old masters and invites the viewer to contemplate.

Since 1958 Fong's work has been exhibited at art galleries and events around the world, with solo exhibitions in Carmel, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, Munich, Paris, San Diego, San Francisco, Taichung, and Taipei, as well as in group exhibitions in Beijing, Brussels, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Sao Paulo, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Taipei.^[3]

Fong's art is in the collections of major art museums, including the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford, England, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Cernuschi Museum in Paris, the Denver Art Museum, the Guangdong Museum of Art, the Harvard University Arthur M. Sackler Museum in Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the M.H. De Young Museum in San Francisco, the National Museum of Art and History in Taipei, the San Diego Museum of Fine Arts, and other museums in Kaohsiung, Shenzhen, and Taipei.^[3]

His 2018 mixed media on canvas piece titled 2018-8-8 is on permanent display at San Francisco International Airport in Harvey Milk Terminal 1.^[4] In 2025 his representatives, Alisan Fine Arts, organized his first New York exhibition at their gallery there, titled Fong Chung-Ray: Meditations in Abstraction.^[5]

Catalogs

• Fong, Chung-Ray; Fong, Lo; Chen, Abby (May 2015). Fong Chung-Ray • A Retrospective 2015. China Art Press. ISBN 978-99965-710-6-0.
• Fong, Chung-ray; Liu, Chu-tsing; Yu, Kwang-chung; Sullivan, Michael (2013). Shu, Jianhua; Xu, Xinru (eds.). Fong Chung-Ray: A Retrospective. Silicon Valley Asian Art Center. ISBN 978-0-615-85504-2.
• Johnson, Mark Dean; Liu, Manni (2014). Long, Sara; Wang, Maria; Zhang, Shudao (eds.). Fong Chung-ray: Between Modern and Contemporary. Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco. ISBN 978-0-9822744-9-1.
• Johnson, Mark Dean; Pan, An-yi; Ng, Sarah; Knothe, Florian (June 2024). Abstract Evolutions: Sixty Years of Paintings by Fong Chung-Ray. University Museum and Art Gallery, University of Hong Kong. ISBN 978-988-74708-7-8.
• Meng, Changming; Wiborg, Richard; Chun, Doris Sze; Sullivan, Michael (2008). Chou, Hui-Li (ed.). Fong Chung-Ray's Recent Paintings 1997-2008. Modern Art Gallery. ISBN 978-957-8738-19-5.
• Mowry, Robert D. A Tradition Redefined: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Ink Paintings from the Chu-tsing Li Collection 1950-2000. Yale University Press. p. 229, 244. ISBN 978-1-891771-47-7.
• Pan, An-Yi (July 2022). Transcending Fragments: Fong Chung-Ray's Artistic Journey (Chinese/English). Translated by Ambrozy, Lee. Asia Art Center Co., Ltd. ISBN 978-986-95664-2-1.
• Pan, Shien-jen, ed. (2011). 現代潮 五〇, 六〇年代台灣美術 [The Modernist Wave. Taiwan Art in the 1950s and 1960s]. National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. p. 147. ISBN 978-986-02-8859-9.
• Vazieux, Sabine; Huang, Chiu-Chen; Harambourg, Lydia (2017). From China to Taiwan, 1955-1985 : Les Pionniers de l'abstraction - Pioneers of Abstraction. Brussels: Éditions Racine. ISBN 978-2-390250-16-6.
• 尋找前衛的因子 : 1946-1969年 [The Search for the Avant-Garde 1946-69]. Taipei Fine Arts Museum. 2011. ISBN 978-986-03-0997-3.

Other references

• Andrews, Julia F.; Shen, Kuiyi (2012). The Art of Modern China. University of California Press. p. 248-49. ISBN 978-0-5202710-6-7.
• Peng, Lü (2013). A History of Art in 20th-Century China. Paris: Somogy. ISBN 978-2-757207-00-0.
• Sullivan, Michael (1996). Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China. University of California Press. p. 1984-85. ISBN 978-0-520075-56-6.
• Sullivan, Michael (2006). Modern Chinese Artists: A Biographical Dictionary. University of California Press. p. 36. ISBN 978-0-520-24449-8.
• Weschler, Jeffrey, ed. (1997). Asian Traditions/Modern Expressions: Asian American Artists and Abstraction, 1945-1970. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. p. 41. ISBN 978-0-810926-82-0.

• Taiwanese art