Jes Fan is an artist born in Canada and raised in

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...

, currently based in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

. Their work looks at the intersection of biology and identity, 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

after being born in Canada shortly after his parents immigrated in 1989. Fan holds a BFA in Glass from

Rhode Island School of Design The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD , pronounced "Riz-D") is a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island. The school was founded as a coeducational institution in 1877 by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, who sought to increase the ...

and their current studio practice and residence is in

Brooklyn, NY Brooklyn () is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. Kings County is the most populous Administrative divisions of New York (state)#County, county i ...

. 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. Fan has exhibited his art in galleries across the world including Australia, the United Kingdom, New York, and Hong Kong.

Work

In a review of Fan's work, contemporary art periodica
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

Artsy Artsy, formally known as Art.sy Inc is a New York City based online art brokerage. Its main business is developing and hosting website for numerous galleries as well as selling art for them. It utilizes a search engine and database to draw conn ...

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?" Fan has been featured in an ongoing series of short interviews for

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...

Art21 ''Art:21 - Art in the 21st Century'' is a PBS series, educational resource, archive, and history of contemporary art. It premiered in 2001, and is now broadcast in over 50 countries worldwide. Premiering a new season every two years, ''Art:21'' i ...

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. 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. A work in this series entitled ''Mother of Pearl'' (2020-2022) explores the feeling of not belonging as well as internalized trauma. 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.

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 Art Basel is a for-profit, privately owned and managed, international Art exhibition, art fair staged annually in Basel, Switzerland; Miami Beach; Hong Kong and from 2022, Paris. Art Basel works in collaboration with the host city's local instit ...

, Hong Kong (2023) *''Mother is a Woman''
Empty Gallery
Hong Kong (2018) *''No Clearance in Niche,'' Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2017) *''Disposed to Add,'' Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia (2017) *''Ot(her)'', Sarah Doyle Gallery, Brown University, Rhode Island (2016)

Selected group exhibitions

Source: *"Even Better than the Real Thing", Whitney Museum, 2024 *
The Milk of Dreams
',

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

, 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
Southbank Art Center, London (2019) *''An Opera for Animals,'
Rockbund Art Museum
Shanghai *''In my room''
Antenna Space
Shanghai *''SportCult''
Team Gallery
NYC *''Paradox: The Body in the Age of AI'', Miller ICA, Carnegie Mellon University *''Uproot,'' Smack Mellon, New York (2017) *''Glass Ceiling,''

UrbanGlass UrbanGlass, located on Fulton Street in the historic 1918 Strand Theatre in the Downtown Brooklyn Cultural District is the New York metropolitan area's leading glass-blowing facility. UrbanGlass was founded in 1977 by three artists and was origina ...

, 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. He has taken part in residencies including Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program in Brooklyn (2019), Para Site in Hong Kong (2017), Recess Art Session Artist in Residence,

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts is located in the Old Market Historic District of downtown Omaha, Nebraska, at the corner of 12th Street and Leavenworth Street. In addition to an international artist-in-residence program, Bemis Center hosts te ...

Residency, Pioneer Works Residency, Rhode Island School of Design Glass (2017),

Pioneer Works Pioneer Works is a non-profit cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Red Hook, New York City. The center builds community through the arts and sciences to create an open and inspired world. It encourages radical thinking across disciplines by provi ...

(2017), Spring Workshop in Hong Kong,.. He was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fan, Jes Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century Canadian artists Hong Kong artists Canadian expatriates in the United States Rhode Island School of Design alumni Canadian queer artists Canadian non-binary artists 21st-century Canadian LGBT people Canadian people of Hong Kong descent