Ming Fei, who made magic sculptures for the natural world, dies in 82

Anyone who enters the New York City Tunnels must notice on Dylansi Street, the amazing mosaic pictures of fish heads inlaid in the white birth walls at the station. It is bordered by gold, with shades of pink, purple and blue, they give their iris citizens every meeting of the king or the queen on an old coin, but with an atmosphere of bleeding.

Passengers who continue the basement on the train F will discover mosaic Three huge tension Cover one wall and generosity, spread the cherry grove on the wall through the tracks.

This mosaic ended in 2004, and the most obvious public artworks of the sculptor Ming Fay, who died on February 23 at home in Manhattan. It was 82.

His son, Parker Fei, who confirmed the death, said that the reason was a heart event.

The general art of Mr. Fay was inspired by the history of the site and the natural surrounding areas. His first installation, at Public School 7Q in ElMhurst, included Queens, in 1995, a huge bronze gate in the form of a leaf sheet. to Wafarah Whithoul Station In the center of Manhattan, a granite seats were designed in the form of a boat to honor the indigenous Americans who crossed from Statin Island to Manhattan by the boat.

The Delangey street was a reference to a fish of indigenous population whose population was diminished and the metro cancer headed in Brooklyn quickly passed under the water themselves. Mr. Fai was generally not working in the mosaic – it was assembled by a team of specialists.

Otherwise, the shade was typical for its practice: an easily ignored feature of the natural world that it made and cannot be missed by expanding it to the human domain.

For more than 50 years – in a series of studios in the Chinese district, in Manhattan; In Dombo, Brooklyn; In Jersey City, New Jersey; At his home, which was high over the Strand Library near Union Square in Manhattan, until he moved further than Broadway in 2013-Master Fai made a giant giant, very realistic fruits, vegetables, woolen, a drug, and almost painful “hybrid” bodies.

In his work, Western techniques and influences have achieved Chinese symbolic symbolism and a somewhat romantic view of the natural world. Many pieces were inspired by a wide range of seeds, nuts, and other natural things that were given or captured over the years.

When writing to the New York Times in 1991, Michael Princeon Bones, Mr. Fayy, the rich, and wallets, described “relatives far from the fruits of Clayus Oldenburg, giant shells of Tony Karaj, and organic pictorial abstracts of Robert Thrien.”

But they were not only that. In the exhibition booklet in 1998, the poet and critic John Yao suggested that there is a revolutionary thing in the mix of cultures of components.

Mr. Yao wrote: “Instead of the barrier between art and culture, as Flavin, Warhol and others did,” Fi, by building wide -ranging sculptures of fruits, and pods seeds and vegetables, reminds us that nature, instead of culture, is what we all finally live. “

Ming Ji Fay was born on February 2, 1943, in Shanghai, to Ting Jing and Rix Fai, both of whom are artists. After moving to Hong Kong in 1952, his father worked as a group designer and studied his mother. She also learned of her son to make paper lanterns and paper aircraft.

In addition to his son, who runs his studio, Mr. Fayy survived his sister, Moon Fai, a game designer and partner, Hong Bayan, an artist. His marriage to Boy Lee Chang ended in divorce.

Speaking to WP, William Patterson University Journal, where he was a professor of sculpture, Mr. Fai recalled that his interest in art had woke up while he was confined to bed as a child, during a year healing of appendicitis.

“The only things that I had to look at are the comic books,” he said. “I read everything from the main paint books to comic books during that time.

When he was 18 years old, a full scholarship was offered to the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio, where he was one of the first Asian students. He had chosen the design, based on the urgency of his father, as a more practical path of fine art, and later that training with some of his success in the general decline.

But before his testimony ended, he fell in love with sculpture and transferred him to the Kansas City Institute of Arts, where he performed great engineering work in the steel and obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts in 1967. Follow this with a master’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1970.

In 1972, Mr. Fai moved to New York, where he first landed on the Alawi Street channel near the Chinese neighborhood markets full of interesting products. Then it turns from engineering steel to the pioneering paper, partly for practical reasons.

“In the first days in New York when I lived and working in a loft with very limited resources for sculpting materials,” Remember at a later time“A pile of Sunday inspired me in the New York Times to try to make sculptures of paper.”

The first to make it is the giant pear, which is a traditional Chinese symbol of prosperity. Over the years, also work with spray foam, wax, ceramics, and drawing. Later, he moved from individual creatures to create whole environments in the garden or Junglelle.

The finding of society in New York was a struggle, and the chances of Asian artists were few. Ultimately, Mr. Fayy became a friend of other artists – among them, HSIEH, Chakaia Boker and David Dio – began to hold noisy dinner parties. In 1982, he and half a half of other artists of Chinese origin formed the epoxy arts collection, which made multiple political work based on research, including “thirty -six tactics” (1987) and “ending colonialism in Hong Kong” (1992), using news dwelling and zirox machines.

In addition to teaching in William Patterson, Mr. Fai was a visiting professor at the Renhardt College of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College. He also took a break for a semester of his MFA teaching program at Hong Kong University. His works were collected by the Brooklyn Museum and the John Michael Kuller Center in Wisconsin, among other institutions, and was shown in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the main mainland of China, and around the United States. In New York, Alyan was represented by fine arts.

Speaking to the Times in 2012, Mr. Fai described his extraordinary artistic way as a reaction to his environment and as a way to heal himself and others.

He said: “I am an urban person, a boy in the city.” “In the Middle West, there was an abundance of nature.

He added, “I found nature as an interesting place to enter.