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Boston Globe

Find refuge from the heat, real and metaphorical, in an artist's garden

'Edge of the Garden' is an unplanned posthumous tribute. Born in Shanghai, Fay was a fixture of the New York art scene for more than 50 years; permanent monuments to his ethos, a delicate balance between playful and profound, dot the New York cityscape as large-scale public artworks. The exhibition "Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden" is on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's Hostetter Gallery through Sept. 21. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Here in Boston is his portable cornucopia: A long stem cherry, a coconut, a bell pepper, a dourian, a sweet gum. An anise, deep brown and star-shaped, perches on an earthy ground like a human toddler-size living thing. A ginseng root roughly the size of my leg and suspended above ground disarms; its network of visceral wisps and tendrils are so true to life you can almost feel it grasping for moisture in the arid cool of the gallery's climate control. Advertisement Verisimilitude was one of Fay's most obvious gifts. But likeness for its own sake — however utter — was hardly his goal. The reactions of blasé New Yorkers aside, Fay's pieces transcend likeness to the uncanny; basketball-size cherries might prompt an initial chuckle, but wonder soon takes its place. Ming Fay, "Peach," 1990s. Mixed Media. Private Collection. Ming Fay Studio In his close-looking at the overlooked — everyday things mostly confined now to supermarket shelves or your refrigerator at home — Fay brings us back to solid ground. The industrial-scale food industry makes all of this appear as if by magic, a behind-the-veil mass industry so seamless as to appear invisible. Fay refocuses on the wonder of it all, and not just the eye: Among the experiences on offer here is scent; you're invited to open the slim doors of a pair of small cabinets, where you'll find dried ginseng in one and anise in the other. Through the perforated plexiglass that holds them in, aroma comes wafting — the ginseng, acrid and sour, the anise, licoricey sweet. There's a disconnect here, between the obvious, fantastical facsimile of Fay's main oeuvre and the sudden organic rush of odor — decaying plant matter, exhaling its rot. The rift, made sudden and plain, is profound; it transforms Fay's project from whimsical to visceral, and freights it with deeper intent. Walk back, then to a deliberate cluster of his blow-ups of a different nature: a hip-height turkey wishbone, its cool yellow-gray the shade of death, or a dizzyingly intricate sculpture of a bird's skull, more air than matter, the size of a dining room chair, bleached dry by time and sun. Advertisement "Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden," in the Hostetter Gallery. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston It's all fantasy, of course — the conflation of Fay's imagination and remarkable skill. But the friction between these things — dead and living, bountiful and spent — helps give fantasy force. I'm disinclined to think of Fay along the same lines as the wry pop conceptualists that come easily to mind — I don't know whether he intended it or not, but I felt an urge to read this paean to the processes of nature, at least partly, as epitaph. All over the world, Advertisement "Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden," Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston It all leaves me leaning into 'Edge of the Garden' as a memorial exhibition in more ways than one: For Fay, and the world we know. The perfect sheen of plum skin he crafted years ago always flirted with hyper-reality, as all his works do; nothing in nature is so perfect and unscathed. An imagined ideal now reads, to me, like a study model for future generations living a very different life on a scorched earth: We had this, once, and let it go. Fay was never so fatalistic as far as I can tell. He loved the form of things, their colors, their surfaces, dark or light, smooth or knotty and sharp (a suite of drawings, hung in a small darkened space with some of Fay's fanciful hand-scratched zines, reveal his mind as hectic and playful). But nor was be blithely unaware. The exhibition, bathed in natural light against a wall of windows, narrows as it closes; through an archway, a tight cluster of looser, later works, their skin bubbling, seem to chart a new course. Made in the 2010s, it doesn't hurt that many are called 'Flame,' rough perversions of Fay's perfect facsimiles in grotesque transitional states. The future, it seems, is now. MING FAY: EDGE OF THE GARDEN Through Sept. 21. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way. 617-566-1401, Murray Whyte can be reached at