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My work is meaningful when it rings like a bell. It shocks like the new, and it bothers like memory, like facing what you forgot you never knew. When something I wish would stay buried is instead laid bare, what rises from the ground is Presence. It is my animating force, both pure spirit and wild beast. When you see it, your eyes touch it, and then it is you who is touched; you see it move, and you feel your body sway. My work is meaningful when it is kinesthetic: a sensation of color leaves a taste in one’s mouth; pictorial rhythms land like body blows.
I draw with the attention of a lover; I tune my body like a radio. It is more listening than doing. I summon the image from below as though I were kneeling in a river panning for gold. Or, like divining water, I walk through the desert holding a thin branch — tender enough to sway me. Or, like writing a novel with a Ouija board.
I process pictures from seemingly incongruous pieces. I make parts and parts and parts: a doodle on a napkin here, a smear of paint there, a drawing I got mad at and tore out the only good corner. My work arrives less from a master plan than from fragments that emerge from the bottom up, fragments that self-organize and wake up. I imagine all my fragments pinned to my walls or languishing in my drawers like millions of cicada nymphs chewing away underground, growing, waiting for the day they will rise up into the branches to sing as one.
What interests me is how this collection of fragments, this Frankenstein’s monster, gains a soul, a Presence. Its incongruence, rather than waking me from the dream, or rather than being strange, is strangely familiar.
What you see is not so much what I see but rather my experience of seeing. The presence of seeing emanates from behind the canvas. I am reaching to what lies behind appearance. The light energy flowing from back to front is the true subject of my work. All my works burrow through this darkness. The light struggles to slalom back and forth from behind. It struggles past lines, textures, and other image conditions that tell that light’s story. At the same time, your gaze, your light, careens to and fro, reaching to greet it. The magnetic brightness draws front and back together. We find one another in this waltz.
When we experience the sublime, we weep before something other than sadness. When an artwork reaches escape velocity, we awe to the immensity of space; the stars seem absurd — a fearful awe that draws tears. The void calls us to leap into this immensity. An artwork’s illusion shatters illusions. This shattering, this madness truer than the real is, as the Joker says, like gravity: “All it takes is a little push.”
Albert Fung is a Philadelphia-based painter, printmaker, professor, and yoga instructor. He navigates the mysteries of the rectangle, creating visionary spaces.
He has shown at several local galleries including City Arts Salon, Arch Enemy Arts, Boston Street Gallery Roger LaPelle Galleries, and LG Tripp Gallery. He has taught painting and printmaking at Tyler School of Art, University of the Arts, Moore College of Art, Arcadia University, Drexel University, Fleisher Art Memorial, Cheltenham Center for the Arts, and Allens Lane Art Center.
He has a BFA in Printmaking from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Massachusetts College of Art. His newest project is Philly Crit in which he functions as an administrator and a graphic designer. Philly Crit brings artists together from around the Philadelphia area to have meaningful dialogues about their work.
1996
Massachusetts College of Art. Boston. Master of Fine Arts, Fine Arts 2D: Painting/Printmaking
1992
Rochester Institute of Technology. Rochester, NY. Bachelor of Fine Arts: Printmaking
2024
Art Advisory Committee, Member. InLiquid, Philadelphia, PA
Administrator, Graphic Designer. Philly Crit, Philadelphia, PA
2024
Dialouge III. City Arts Salon. Philadelphia, PA. Curated by Kenny White.
2023
Faculty Show. Fleisher Art Memorial. Philadelphia, PA.
2022
Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. Center for Emerging Visual Artists. Philadelphia, PA.
2021
CAS 10. City Arts Salon. Philadelphia, PA. Curated by Kenny White.
2021
Another Terrain. City Arts Salon. Philadelphia, PA. Curated by Kenny White.
2020
Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. Center for Emerging Visual Artists. Philadelphia, PA.
2019
The Healing Fields. The Healing Fields. Philadelphia, PA.
2018
Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series. Arch Enemy Arts. Philadelphia, PA. Juried exhibition.
2017
BYO Print. Random Tea Room. Philadelphia, PA.
2016
Fung & Adams. Boston Street Gallery. Philadelphia, PA.
Out of Print. B Square Gallery. Philadelphia, PA.
2015
Summer Salon. Rodger LaPelle Galleries. Philadelphia, PA.
2014
Art Attack. Westmoreland Studios. Philadelphia, PA.
RSVP 2014. LGTripp GALLERY. Philadelphia, PA.
I’m Only Asking (But I Think You Know). F & N Gallery. Philadelphia, PA.
BYO Print at American Sardine Bar. Street Glitter Gallery. Philadelphia, PA.
Albert Fung. Congregation Kol Ami. Elkins Park, PA
The Blanket Fort Project: Art Dept. Philadelphia, PA.
2010
Light and Dark. Holiday Inn Manhattan View. Long Island City, NY.
NEVER THINK small-Redux!. Climate Gallery. Long Island City, NY.
Denis and Fung. OZANEAUX Ltd. New York.
Armoryfest. Clocktower Building. Long Island City, NY.
2009
Change: Flushing Town Hall Art Center. Flushing, NY. Group exhibition.
2008
Familiar Spaces: Reconsidered. Art-O-Mat Gallery. Long Island City, NY.
Celebrate!. LICFest. Long Island City.
2008
Familiar Spaces: Reconsidered. Art-O-Mat Gallery. Long Island City, NY.
2007
Fung, Kessler, Kimura. Neiman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University. New York.
2005
Summer Interlude. Laumont Editions Gallery. New York.
