Jes Fan

Jes Fan is an artist born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong, currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Their work looks at the intersection of biology and identity,^[1] and explores otherness, kinship, queerness and diasporic politics. Fan has exhibited in the United States, UK, Hong Kong, and others.

Biography

Fan grew up in Hong Kong after being born in Canada shortly after their parents immigrated in 1989.

Fan holds a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design and their current studio practice and residence is in Brooklyn, NY.^[2][3]

Jes Fan is a multidisciplinary artist who creates unique sculptures that feature hormones, bacteria, and fungi with the aim of exploring and challenging the concepts of identity and biology.^[4] Fan has exhibited their art in galleries across the world including Australia, the United Kingdom, New York, and Hong Kong.^[5]

Work

In a review of Fan's work, contemporary art periodical Artforum states.

"Above all, (Fan's) sculptures were promiscuously biomorphic, resembling molecules, organs, orifices, skin, bodies of all kins--wringling forms of life that refuse any single definition."

Online contemporary art broker^[6] Artsy has commented that:

"Fan's desire is to obfuscate the difference between hard and soft, asking us to quantify and justify our sense of queerness as a limp thing. It's a conceptual question for the viewer: How soft must a masculine object get to become feminine?"^[7]

Fan has been featured in an ongoing series of short interviews for PBS's Art21 in their New York Closeup series. In the second short following Fan, titled “Infectious Beauty”, Art21 followed the artist in the production of their sculpture for the 2019 Socrates Sculpture Biennial, ‘what eye no see, no can do’, a series of interconnecting metal rods and slumping fiberglass bodies.^[8]

A more recent series of Fan’s entitled “Sites of Wounding” focuses on pearl farming as a way to bring to light extractive industries. For this work he worked with Pinctada Fucata which is a species native to Hong Kong and is subject to commercial industrial pearl cultivation.^[9] A work in this series entitled Mother of Pearl (2020-2022) explores the feeling of not belonging as well as internalized trauma.^[10] Working with oysters, Fan carves into the pearls they carry within, characters that represent the colonial nickname for Hong Kong, “Pearl of the Orient” and wait to see how they adapt to survive, showing how beauty can occur at sites of wounding.^[11]

List of exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

• "Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2". M+ Museum, Hong Kong
• Sites of Wounding: Chapter 1, Empty Gallery, Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong (2023)
• Mother is a Woman, Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2018)
• No Clearance in Niche, Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2017)^[12]
• Disposed to Add, Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia (2017)
• Ot(her), Sarah Doyle Gallery, Brown University, Rhode Island (2016)

Selected group exhibitions

Source:^[1]

• "Even Better than the Real Thing", Whitney Museum, 2024
• "Weight of Mind", CCS Bard, 2024
• The Milk of Dreams, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2022)
• Soft Water, Hard Stone, New Museum Triennial, New York (2022)
• The Stomach and The Port, Liverpool Biennale, England, (2021)
• Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery Archived 2020-08-29 at the Wayback Machine, Southbank Art Center, London (2019)
• An Opera for Animals, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai
• In my room, Antenna Space Archived 2019-07-18 at the Wayback Machine, Shanghai
• SportCult, Team Gallery, NYC
• Paradox: The Body in the Age of AI, Miller ICA, Carnegie Mellon University
• Glass Ceiling, UrbanGlass, New York (2017)
• In Search of Miss Ruthless, Para Site, Hong Kong (2017)

Awards and residencies

Fan is the recipient of awards including the Pollock Krasner Grant, 2023, Gold Art Prize, 2022, NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship (Sculpture/Craft) 2020, Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant 2017, Jerome Hill Fellowship 2019-2020, Edward and Sally Van Lier Fellowship at Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), CCGA Fellowship at Wheaton Arts, and John A. Chironna Memorial Award at RISD.^[2]

He has taken part in residencies including Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program in Brooklyn (2019), Para Site in Hong Kong (2017),^[2] Recess Art Session Artist in Residence, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Residency, Pioneer Works Residency, Rhode Island School of Design Glass (2017), Pioneer Works (2017),^[13] Spring Workshop in Hong Kong,..^[14] He was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022.