Fong Chung-Ray is 90 years old. He was born into a family of scholars in Henan, China, in 1934, who sent him away from home at 14 as protection against civil war. He then headed to Taiwan with the Nationalist military. There Fong began studying art. In 1958, he founded the Four Seas Painting Society; in 1961, he joined the Fifth Moon Painting Society and also began working with ink on paper. In 1975, Fong moved to San Francisco. Influenced early on by Abstract Expressionism, but also devoted to Buddhism and Chinese art, Fong makes art from acrylic paint, ink, xuan, cotton paper, and calligraphy, using scratch and rubbing techniques. He has developed a distinctive approach to layering—timeless, haunting, gorgeous—that evokes antiquity even as it emerges from modernist impulses. This exhibition at Alisan, Fong’s first survey in New York, presents work from 1965 to 2021. —Laura Jacobs