Response to Mi Fu's Poem Written in a Boat on the Wu River

2013

Not on view

Fung Ming Chip is one of the most innovative practitioners of Chinese calligraphy working today. Inspired by but not limited to the classical canon, Fung constantly seeks new ways to invigorate old forms, and he has spent the last two decades creating novel scripts, some of which deliberately defy the dictates of legibility and push close to abstract art.

The current work is among Fung’s more traditional, because it takes as its explicit inspiration a classical work of art—Mi Fu’s calligraphy Poem Written in a Boat on the Wu River. Since its gift to the Met by John Crawford in 1984, this has been one of the Museum’s signature works of Chinese art, a masterpiece known to Chinese calligraphy enthusiasts the world over (1984.174). Datable to around 1100, Poem Written in a Boat on the Wu River demonstrates Mi Fu’s epochal achievement in calligraphy, for it shows him riding the line between historically informed elegance and strategic imbalance, a delicate dance that only a calligrapher of Mi’s brilliance could successfully manage. Since the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), Mi Fu has been a source of both inspiration and intimidation to calligraphers.

Faced with the daunting task of responding to such a work, Fung departed somewhat from his more typical working mode, in which he uses the hanging scroll format to create striking, iconic images that are meant to address the viewer from the wall. Following the format of Mi Fu’s piece, Fung wrote his response on a handscroll, creating a more intimate object that is meant to be read on a table, one section at a time. Fung adhered to Mi Fu’s overall lineation and composition, and he took care to make the work more legible than much of his nearly abstract calligraphy, honoring the text of the original. But he also injected his own voice. For instance, he uses a whimsical self-created form for the character meaning “wind” (feng 風), while using archaic forms for other characters, including “five” (wu 五). In one section, Fung highlights the coincidental repetition of characters featuring two visually similar components (jian 見 and mu 目) in Mi’s poem; by foregrounding this repetition, he creates a whimsical and almost childlike space within the scroll.

Fung’s voice comes out most strongly in his long inscription at the end of Mi Fu’s poem. Here, Fung departs for the first time from Mi’s compositional structure to lay the characters on the paper according to his own fancy. He clusters the characters on the lower two-thirds of the scroll, building a composition almost like a mountain range out of the words. His meditation on the role of brush-written calligraphy in contemporary life reveals a concern that animates his entire oeuvre.