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 and became a citizen of the United States in 1975.

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. He would not see the rest of his immediate family again until 1979.

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 was captured by the enemy. But it was also while in the military that Fong would develop his artistic talents and interests. But he and many of his generation in China 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.

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 Fifth Moon 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. 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. In 2025 his representatives, Alisan Fine Arts, organized his first New York solo 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 1975 she, their two sons, and one daughter immigrated to the United States with him, settling in 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.

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."