Fong Chung-Ray
Fong Chung-Ray is a Chinese-American artist, regarded as one of the pioneers of abstraction in Chinese painting. Born in Henan, China, in 1934, his childhood education was disrupted by war and revolution. After moving to Taiwan in 1949, he developed his artistic talents and rose to global prominence as an artist. Since 1958 his work has featured in group and solo exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, and is in the permanent collections of major international art museums and other public venues as well as private collections. He moved to California in 1970, and in 1975 became a citizen of the United States.
Early life
Fong Chung-Ray was born in Nanyang, Henan, in 1934, on November 6th by the Chinese calendar, to a prominent family that had relocated to Henan from Shanxi province six generations before, during the early Qing dynasty. They were local gentry, and highly valued education. His father was a teacher, his uncle Feng Youlan was a well-known philosopher, historian and writer, and his aunt Feng Yuanjun was a writer and scholar of Chinese classical literature and literary history, and later a university vice chancellor.When he was a child, the Japanese invasion and the Chinese Civil War deprived him of status and education. He and his family were forced to flee several times beginning around 1937, moving about the country and returning to Nanyang as poor refugees in 1947. Conflict continued outside the town, and he saw many dead bodies. During those ten years his schooling was repeatedly disrupted, and at the age of 14 his family allowed him and his older brother to flee south with their school, following the retreating Nationalist army in 1948. Other than another brother and a sister, he would not see his family again until 1979.
Fong, his older brother, and three classmates — including his best friend Wang Ching-lin, who became the famous poet Ya Hsien — formed a tight group as they fled south. In the summer of 1949, they happened upon a military recruitment poster in Hunan urging them to join up and go to Taiwan. Fong's fourth brother and second sister had already moved to the island. The boys joined the Nationalist military, with one of his companions helping to add a year to Fong's age on his paperwork so he would qualify. This affected his birth date in news, art, and academic publications for many years.
After arriving in Taiwan, their clear northern accents qualified them for communications work in the navy signal corps, and after training Fong was assigned to a radio platoon. Military life was arduous, and a few years later he would survive a hail of bullets and almost drown in a battle, where for the second time in his life he saw many dead bodies, and during which a good friend from Fong's close band of refugees lost his life. But it was also while in the military that he would develop his artistic talents and interests.
Artistic training
Fong was exposed to art in his early childhood and showed some ability, but it was not particularly encouraged, and he had never planned to become an artist. He later said that if he had been able to study, he might have gone into medicine or become a scientist. But because of war he and many of his generation lost their chance at such an education, and it was only due to his military service that he discovered art was to be his calling.While off-duty, he and his best friend Wang Ching-lin began exploring art libraries and cinema. When the government launched programs to broaden the cultural lives of military youth and to offer opportunities to develop the artistic talents of those who had further interest, Fong and Wang joined with others, including another friend from their original refugee group, to create a weekly art-focused newspaper for their regiment. Serving as art editor for that publication deepened Fong's interest in the topic.
Seeking to avoid being separated, Fong and his group applied and passed the entrance exams for the Department of Applied Arts at a military academy, Fu Hsing Kang College. There Fong studied art under instructors of propaganda, military painting, and comic strips, as well as under outside instructors who were also professors at National Taiwan Normal University and were first-rate masters in the fields of painting, wood engraving, and sculpture. One course covered Western art history from the Middle Ages through 19th-century Impressionism, which left Fong very interested in learning more about what had happened after the Impressionist period.
Career
Upon graduation in 1954, Fong was commissioned as a naval officer. His job was to produce art for morale and military propaganda, but in his free time he pursued deeper knowledge of modern art. His 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.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 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. 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. When he settled in San Francisco in 1975, 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.
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 Centre Pompidou and the Musée Cernuschi in Paris, the Denver Art Museum, the Guangdong Museum, the Harvard University Arthur M. Sackler Museum in Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, and other museums in Kaohsiung, Shenzhen, and Taipei.
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. In 2025 his representatives, Alisan Fine Arts, organized his first New York exhibition at their gallery there, titled Fong Chung-Ray: Meditations in Abstraction.
Personal life
Fong married Zhong Guoming in 1960. Born in 1939, Zhong was a non-combat lieutenant officer serving in a military women's youth task force when they met. In 1970 she, their three sons, and one daughter relocated with him to San Francisco. During their early days there, she helped support the family by designing and selling handicrafts from an artist's street stall at Fisherman's Wharf. They became US citizens in 1975.Zhong died in a car accident in 2002. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of her death, Fong created a painting titled "12-08". One of his few works on canvas to use non-Buddhist writings, it includes a passage from the Nirvana Sutra on severing one's bondage to the material world but also quotes a poem from the Song dynasty poet Su Shi that includes the words "Ten years apart, life and death are obscured. I don't try to think of you, yet I cannot forget you."