Fung Ming Chip

Born in 1951 in a poor village in Guangdong Province, China, Fung Ming Chip benefited from no more than a primary school education before his family moved to New Jersey in the USA in 1977. Fung Ming Chip is unique among China's young generation of contemporary artists. He has taken China's rich calligraphic legacy and looked at it with a twenty-first century eye. He gives as much importance to the spaces within and between the characters, and the sequence with which the ink is applied as he does to the literary content. He has created over 50 new calligraphic scripts and succeeded at adding an element of playfulness into what had been sacrosanct academic tradition. A major retrospective of the artist's work was held in 1999 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and his first UK exhibition was held at Goedhuis Contemporary during London's Asian Art Week in November 2000. Fung Ming Chip's work has been featured in magazines such as New York Arts Magazine, Orientations, Asia Sculptures News and numerous Chinese journals.