Fung Ming Chip Chinese American, b. 1951

Fung was born in China’s Guangdong Province (b.1951) and raised in Hong Kong. He is now based in Hong Kong after living in New York and Taipei. Apart from practicing calligraphy and seal carving, Fung also writes essays, fictions, and poems.

Fung began carving seals in 1975, and started his practice of shufa - the art of Chinese writing - soon afterwards. He has invented over one hundred calligraphic scripts that explore the process of embedding time in writing, and explored through his art and writing the challenge of reading time in works of shufa. Building upon and challenging traditional practice, Fung’s contemporary shufa has experimented with musical notation, numbers, and mechanical processes. 

In 2012, Fung was invited by Maxwell K. Hearn, Curator of Asian Art of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to select a work of shufa from the Met’s permanent collection and create a new work in response.  Fung selected “Boat on the Wu River” by the Northern Song dynasty artist and scholar Mi Fu (1051-1107.)  In the 1980’s Fung first encountered this hand scroll on view at the Museum and was entranced, struck by the beauty of Mi’s elegant brushwork: He stood there for over an hour.  In Fung’s response, he reproduced the composition and content of the original, but systematically and playfully modified the characters to reflect his own, distinctly contemporary approach to shufa.  Fung’s completed piece, “Response to Mi Fu’s Poem Written in a Boat on the Wu River,” is now a part of the Met’s permanent collection.  Fung’s work was also featured in the Met’s 2014 show, “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China.”

Fung’s works have been collected by a number of major art institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago,Chicago; the White Rabbit Collection, Sydney; the Brooklyn Museum; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, among others. Fung held a major solo retrospective at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 1999. He was an artist in residence at Cambridge University in 2004. In 2008, Hermes invited Fung to create a tableware pattern titled “Les Poemes du Mandarin”.