Gardens are wild things with minds of their own, but even so they express the character of their gardeners. Gardens teach patience and balance, welcome diversity and imperfection. They awaken the senses and connect us to nature’s infinite wisdom—that we are all part of something much greater than ourselves.

This summer the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum pays tribute to its founder's passion for horticulture with exhibitions dedicated to the garden. On the Anne G. Fitzpatrick Facade, Boston-based artist Yu-Wen Wu’s Reigning Beauty portrays flowers found in the pages of Gardner’s journals falling through an uneasy sky toward a gnarled scholar’s rock. Flowers for Isabella depicts Gardner’s innovative cultivation techniques in photographs and paintings from the archive. And a curated idyll of orchids, ferns, hydrangeas, etc comes to life in the courtyard through the ambient insect sounds of Lee Mingwei’s soundscape Small Conversations, part of the museum’s 2017 exhibition Listen Hear: The Art of Sound.

Drawing in the exhibition "Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden," in the Hostetter Gallery, 26 June – 21 September 2025. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

But in the New Wing’s spacious Hostetter Gallery, the sublime exhibition Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden has the largest plot in which to sow meaningful connections between nature, art and human experience.

Edge of the Garden is the most comprehensive exhibition of work by Chinese-American artist Ming Fay (1943–2025) to date, including 80 large-scale botanical sculptures, archival drawings, zines, studio sketches, and a video interview with his son, Parker. Joyful and cautionary, bold and humble, the show is the product of two years of planning between curator Gabrielle Niu and the artist before he passed away in February. I spoke with Ming’s son about growing up in the studio, the exhibition, and the importance of gardens to his remarkable father’s art and life.

Ming Fay in His Studio, c. 1990s. The Estate of Ming Fay. Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Ming Fay was born in Shanghai to artist parents. They moved to Hong Kong in the early 50’s to escape Mao’s Chinese Communist Party. His dream of studying art in the United States was realized when Fay received a full scholarship to the Columbus College of Art and Design. There he discovered a love of sculpture, influenced by his mother who had taught him to use papier-mâché as a child. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, received his MFA at UC Santa Barbara, and went on to teach sculpture at universities, which he would continue enthusiastically for most of his adult life.

Ming Fay (American, 1943 – 2025), Ming Fay in Studio with *Pear*, 1990s. Photograph. Private Collection. Image courtesy the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

In 1973 Fay made his way to New York City and never looked back. As his son explained, “Ming loved New York… he wanted to be there. He thought of himself as a downtown New York artist. Not a Chinese artist or an American artist.”

But of course, spending his childhood in Shanghai and Hong Kong made an indelible impact. His surreal sculptures of plants, vegetables, fruit, bones, shells, seeds and pods allowed him not only to indulge an obsession with observation and technical precision, but also to investigate his experience as an immigrant.

It was not easy being an Asian American artist in New York in the 70’s and 80’s. Asian Americans were isolated from a lot of art world happenings and grossly under-represented in gallery and museum shows. Ming Fay co-founded the Epoxy Art Group (1982-1992) in order to acknowledge and support artists experiencing the same kind of marginalization. The group created installations, zines and photo collages which were political and humorous. He was also involved in the Asian American Art Network Godzilla responsible for an open letter sent in 1991 to the Whitney Museum criticizing the lack of representation in that year’s Whitney Biennial.

Ming Fay began making his now signature XL fruit sculptures using wire frames and papier-mâché in response to observations made in his new city of New York. He also had to adjust to a smaller studio space than what he had enjoyed in the midwest, when he was making large abstract bronzes.

Many fruits and plants carry deep symbolism in Chinese culture. The pear, his first fruit sculpture, represents prosperity, Parker explained. The peach, longevity. Seeds embody the potential for new life, or new beginnings. Exploring cultural meaning through familiar objects allowed Fay to connect to both his Chinese and American selves, and consider how we are all part of the same natural world even if we live very different lives.

The exhibition *Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden*, in the Hostetter Gallery, 26 June – 21 September 2025. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

The best way to experience Edge of the Garden is to follow it from beginning to end as Niu intended. Rarely seen sketches, zines, paintings and the video narrated by Parker Fay offer an understanding of the artist’s studio practices, lower Manhattan environment and aspirations.

The first large gallery is curated more like a natural history museum than a garden. Fay’s outsized, hyperreal sculptures sit neatly on gravel the color of deer hide and hang elegantly on ecru walls. Arrangements are careful and calm. Damien Hirst’s anarchic The Secrets this is not.

Overhead, lit by the Renzo Piano-designed wall of windows, is Floating Reeds, the delicate, dramatic spray of branches and leaves which took museum staff days to install.

*Floating Reeds* cascades over a vignette of Fay’s sculptures in the Hostetter Gallery, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

By design, the show mimics the evolution of Ming Fay’s artistic life. He started by creating large scale fruits, plants. pods. bones and seeds based on real things he observed. The giant peach pit and wishbones are beautiful examples. Parker remembers him working constantly, forever inspired by the world around him. He created a unique garden of whimsy and reverence worthy of both Dr. Seuss and Harvard’s Glass Flowers.

As time went on, Fay’s garden became a jungle. Sculptures based on real objects from nature give way to psychedelic hybrids, unidentifiable but just as seemingly alive as his large-scale lifelike work. The third gallery, “the tunnel,” is a full body experience of color, chaos and animated imagination. Brightly colored abstractions made from polyurethane foam created in the late 90’s and early 2,000s evoke a very different viewer response; they provoke more questions. Pushing his craft, and exploring new psychological terrain, Fay evoked more urgency with this later work. Pay attention this work insists, Nature is vulnerable. And we realize he had been saying that all along, just in a gentler tone.

From garden to jungle—The exhibition *Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden*, in the Hostetter Gallery, 26 June – 21 September 2025. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

Nature is wild, harmonious, political and personal. Isabella Stewart Gardner knew this and so did Ming Fay. Fay’s work honors both the fleeting and the universal. By elevating flowers and seeds and bones and shells to human-sized objects, he reminds us that nature connects all things. Whether in China or the United States a pear holds infinite wisdom within its delicate skin, if we know how to look for it.

Additional exhibitions of Ming Fay’s work this summer and fall:

The Campus, 2025 Annual Exhibition

At The Campus in upstate New York, a group exhibition presents Ming Fay’s work in company with work by Naudline Pierre, Katharina Grosse, Rita Ackermann, Kiki Smith, Dana Schutz, Richard Tuttle, Huma Bhabha, Marta Minujín, Alicia Kwade and others.

Organized by former Hauser & Wirth curator Timo Kappeller, this exhibition spans 35 rooms and the grounds of a former school, which has been transformed into a collaborative art space by NYC galleries Bortolami, James Cohan, kaufmann repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps, & kurimanzutto. Check the website for performances and programming and make a pilgrimage this summer!

Pao Arts Center, Where We Meet: Imagining Gardens and Futures

Visitors check out some smaller sculptures in "Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden.” Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum, Boston

Gabrielle Niu curates a partner exhibition to the Gardner’s inspired by the residents and activists who have worked for years to cultivate gardens and greenspaces across Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood. Yu-Wen Wu and Ming Fay meet again in this exhibit, joined by Boston-based artist Mel Taing. Niu draws on Ming Fay’s proposals for public art as a way to get people thinking about the possibilities for creating public art in Boston’s Chinatown.

Alisan Fine Arts, New York

Solo gallery show in September 2025

Hero Image: Ming Fay (American, 1943 – 2025), Ming Fay at NYC Subway Station with Pepper, 1984. Photograph. Private Collection. Courtesy the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.