Art review: calligrapher Fung Ming Chip plays with characters

Hong Kong’s auction market has long been dominated by traditional literati ink paintings, ceramics and furniture. Inevitably, this interest in antiquities has expanded, with galleries now specialising in, as well as exhibiting, contemporary Chinese ink art.

This culminated in the city’s first dedicated ink art fair – Ink Asia 2015 – last weekend (December 18 to 20).

Appropriately, Galerie du Monde’s parallel exhibition with the fair is of works by artist Fung Ming Chip, one of the stalwarts of calligraphy in Hong Kong.

SEE ALSO: Script tease: Fung Ming Chip makes new play on Chinese characters

Fung explains that “shu fa” is writing as an art form made up of three parts. First, it is the written characters; second, the way of writing; and third, “like the flower to garnish the dish”, is the seal carving adhered to a painting to mark the presence of the artist.

Fung explains that as a young man, it was seal carving that initially held his interest. Over the years, he has experimented with mural-sized wood blocks that extended the idea of seal carving.

And his seals, chopped on paper in standard vermilion red and also shown in this exhibition, are often non-traditional – a naive carved word font, printed backwards, or containing just a single symbol or object, a rabbit or gourd, for example.

Fung is a playful calligrapher. His artistic interest is held by experimentation alongside the more formal struggle to find the aesthetic balance of text within the blankness of paper. He uses countless script forms, including impressions of musical notation, “multi-lined” or double imagery as seen in a mirror, scattered text across the paper, some bold and others light-watered.