Rossano Fan - painter, architect

Architect who found the artist within

Rossano Fan, painter, architect: b Guangzhou, October 13, 1934; m Mary Sue, 2d, 1s; d Wellington, July 17, aged 79.

ROSSANO FAN, who arrived in Levin after migrating to New Zealand from Hong Kong in 1963, harboured aspirations of one day becoming a world famous architect.

In a 2011 documentary film, directed and produced by Richard Riddiford, Fan portrayed himself as a tortured genius treading a tricky line between delusion and brilliance for much of his adult life.

In the documentary he revealed himself to be someone who, despite his age, was determined to one day become New Zealand’s answer to a Frank Lloyd Wright or a Le Corbusier.

He was educated in southern China and in Hong Kong. In 1963 he married a hard-working market gardener from Levin, Mary Sue, who was the rock upon which his latter life artistic endeavours were built.

Mary Sue was the product of a prominent market gardening family from Horowhenua and travelled to Hong Kong after being raised in Levin.

At the time of his marriage, Fan worked as a designer of intricate Chinese character headstones located at places like the Pokfulam cemetery which clung to steep hillsides on Hong Kong Island.

He was a smart, savvy and handsome man about town when he met his then young New Zealand wife.

The migrant’s journey to the sparsely populated Levin, from one of the world’s most densely populated cities, proved a major challenge for Fan.

But in Levin this often-misunderstood man did manage to set himself up as an architect in the rural township.

His wider family had high hopes for him and he overcame many challenges in setting up in business as an independent architect.

Fan’s father, Fan Chi Hung, was a leading architect in Communist China who fell on hard times during the Cultural Revolution.

His mother, Edith Wong, doted on the eldest of her four boys when the family was growing up in the British colony.

Soon after arriving in New Zealand from Hong Kong he took up a job working for prominent Palmerston North-based architect David Taylor before branching out on his own as a residential home architect.

Among his clients were the late great All Black and Petone prop forward Ken Gray and artist Sir Toss Woollaston.

Fan was not interested in his wife’s family’s market gardening business.

Instead this individualist channelled his enthusiasm into his somewhat sporadic architectural career, during which he designed a small number of landmark homes throughout the Wellington region.

He also travelled to America to study architecture under Marcel Breuer, the designer of UNESCO’s Paris headquarters and New York’s Whitney Museum buildings.

He returned to New Zealand after getting bored with what he viewed as a preoccupation with ‘‘concrete jungle’’ architecture in the United States.

He struggled to win recognition among New Zealand architects but forged friendships with Wellingtonians Roger Walker and Ian Athfield, who both appreciated his work.

Soon after his family shifted to Wellington and their Karori home from Horowhenua about 1990, Fan retired from architecture and took up painting fulltime.

In retirement he also lived for a period in Beijing where he exhibited his artwork before falling ill there, from a bleed to the brain, about two years ago.

This entertaining raconteur lived out the remainder of his days at Berhampore’s Vincentian home.

In her eulogy at the funeral, his elder daughter, Serena, described her father as a unique, noncompromising, contradictory, brilliant, complex, philosophical, articulate, loving, precise and challenging character.

She also described him as a scholar of life who was always wanting to read and challenge himself while pursuing a passionate interest in art, music, photography, jewellery and fashion.

He loved the finer things in life such as Italian suits, expensive ties, shoes and cars. Friends and family were often shown his bags of treasures.

He was a man with an eye for a bargain and was well known to pawnbrokers – both as a buyer and a seller.

In the finish, the artistic side of this open-minded man won out. When he arrived in Wellington he made many friends from varying backgrounds. He loved nothing more than a stimulating conversation with like-minded, alternative thinkers.

His unconventional character was referred to by the Rev Gon Loong, an elderly member of the Wellington Chinese community, who noted the poem about ‘‘the ancient one who flew off on his yellow crane,’’ was the first time he had come across a famous Chinese poem being cited at a Chinese funeral service.

Family and friends said the funeral service sheet reference to the poem was a reflection of ‘‘Fan, the Chinese scholar’’.