Pillar Arc

Fantastically oversized and poetically evocative sculptures of plants, flowers, fruits, vegetables, seedpods, and shells are the subjects of Ming Fay’s art. He crafts these natural forms out of various materials—including metal, wood, paper, glass, and wire—and arranges them in room-sized installations that are both visually spectacular and densely layered with meaning. These sculptures represent the physical, psychological, and spiritual nourishment provided by the botanical realm.

Fay’s art is also imbued with humor and wide-ranging cultural allusions. His depictions of gigantic plants are reminiscent of the mysterious-island and forbidden-planet adventures of 1950s and ’60s science-fiction movies, while his jumbo fruit sculptures evoke the surreal Garden of Earthly Delights by the early 16th-century Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch. Fay’s sculptures also play with the traditional Chinese connotations of certain fruits—such as peaches (longevity), cherries (love), and pears (prosperity)—that he adapts for his own metaphorical uses. Overall, Fay’s work reveals the innate wonder and complexity of even the humblest natural forms, which are part of the vast ecosystem that we share.

To create Pillar Arc for the courthouse in Seattle, Fay took inspiration from a single scale of a cedar cone. Fay selected the cedar because of its spiritual and historical connections to the Pacific Northwest. Some of the largest western red cedars grow on the Olympic Peninsula. The tree also has special symbolic meaning and practical uses for the area’s Native American communities, who for centuries have used its pliable bark for weaving and its durable wood for building longhouses and canoes. Fay enlarged the cedar-cone scale to the monumental stature of a tree, a transformation that emphasizes, in the artist’s words, “the inherent beauty, nuance, and poetry of the form.” Pillar Arc also possesses an anthropomorphic quality; its upright posture and elegant curves suggests a human figure. The well-balanced sculpture metaphorically embodies the function of the courthouse.