Opening Night Reception with Fong Chung-Ray, October 29, 2025

Fong Chung-Ray: Meditations in Abstraction
October 29 – December 20, 2025
120 East 65th Street, NYC

Now on view at Alisan Fine Arts is Fong Chung-Ray: Meditations in Abstraction, the artist’s first New York exhibition, offering a six-decade survey of his distinctive synthesis of Western modernism and Asian aesthetics. A seminal figure in Chinese abstraction and a founding member of the Fifth Moon Group, Fong Chung-Ray (b. 1934) developed an experimental approach that merges the gestural energy of American painting with the contemplative sensibility of Chinese calligraphy.

His innovations—including a coarse palm-fiber brush created in the 1960s, the use of acrylic to emulate ink, and a unique “reverse rubbing” transfer technique—produce richly textured surfaces reminiscent of weathered walls and ancient manuscripts. Since the 1980s, Fong has incorporated Buddhist sutras into his compositions, transforming sacred text into meditations on form, formlessness, and impermanence. Having lived through profound cultural shifts, he has continually expanded the language of abstraction while remaining deeply rooted in Eastern heritage.

During his opening night speech on October 29, Fong reflected on how the textures of daily life, from old walls to ancient bronze vessels, shaped his artistic evolution from the influence of traditional Chinese landscape painting to his pursuit of abstraction:

“I find beauty in the worn and the weathered.”

Watch an excerpt here!