In a feature by Tiana Reid with photographs by Allison Lippy: Jes Fan is described as ‘Creator of Haunting Sculptures, Manipulates Materials on a Molecular Level’.
““The tears that you cry when you’re sad, when you’re happy, or when you’re yawning are actually different molecular compositions,” Jes Fan explains over Zoom. “Thinking about things at the molecular level excites me.” These are recurrent themes in the Hong Kong- and Brooklyn-based artist’s work: smallness, intellectual engagement, and the biological code that underpins and defines our turbulent emotional lives.”
Sean Burns recently covered the 13th Taipei Biennial, Small World, for Frieze magazine in his article ‘Trailer for a Spectacle: Taipei Biennial 2023’.
“‘Small World’, the title of the Taipei Biennial 2023, contains both a promise and a threat. It speaks to a stricken, shrinking and interconnected planet but also to a sense of insularity, intimacy and proximity. As with most biennials, the size of the curatorial task at hand – structuring a sprawling show across three floors of the Fine Arts Museum, featuring 58 artists and 120 individual works – calls for a conceit broad enough to feel encompassing but specific enough to hold critical sway…
‘Small World’ has a feeling of lightness about it that I like. The curators haven’t been afraid to programme idiosyncratically (one room contains a spirited small survey of Taiwanese maverick Li Jiun-Yang, replete with glow-in-the-dark drawings and bespoke musical instruments) and according to their fascination with sound and its relationship to visual art. The show contains some exceptional works, none more exciting than Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is) (2023), about whom Wood quips: ‘You can tell she’s a club kid.’ It’s a searing installation of ominous black, rubbery walls inflated by six air pumps. Resonant frequencies from the pumps blast out of six speakers in a play between muscularity, circularity and softness.”
Tishan Hsu’s solo exhibition ‘recent work 2023’ is now open to the public at Secession, Vienna through February 25, 2024.
Titled recent work 2023, the American artist Tishan Hsu’s exhibition at the Secession consists entirely of new works. After his first major retrospective, which opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2020 and then traveled to the SculptureCenter in New York, where Hsu lives, the artist’s work was prominently featured in the central exhibition The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. For last year’s Carnegie International, he conceived several large-scale sculptures; the sculptures he now presents at the Secession elaborate on the ideas they articulate. Taken together, these three major exhibitions in recent years threw Hsu’s creative evolution over the past four decades into relief, illustrating both his changing choices of techniques and materials and his methodological constancy and persistent pursuit of key concerns.
Gió Marconi is pleased to announce Motherboy, a group exhibition born out of the dialogue between curator Stella Bottai and artist Gray Wielebinski around the so-called “mammone” (mummy’s boy) – a notion that their own embodied experiences – as mother and son respectively – celebrate, critique, and reconfigure. The exhibition is on view from 24 November 2023 through 17 February 2024.
Artists: Sophia Al Maria; Jonathan Lyndon Chase; Patrizio Di Massimo; Bracha L. Ettinger; Hadi Falapishi; Jes Fan; Apostolos Georgiou; Allison Katz; Leigh Ledare; Maia Ruth Lee; Gaetano Pesce; Jenna Sutela; Gray Wielebinski; Kandis Williams; Bruno Zhu
Solstice, a proposal by the artist Anne Bourse, opened at Galerie Crèvecœur on November 23 and runs through January 20, 2024. The group exhibition explores the meanings of light through sculpture.
Artists: Martine Bedin, Christophe Berhault, Than Hussein Clark, Anne Bourse, Mimosa Echard, Kim Farkas, Alice Gavalet, Karl Holmqvist, Jacent, Cooper Jacoby, Ernst Yohji Jaeger & Yasuaki Hamada, Renaud Jerez, Mélanie Matranga, Jessi Reaves, Louise Sartor, Josef Strau, Cici Wu
The Taipei Biennial 2023: Small World is now on view. Curated by Freya Chou, Reem Shadid, and Brian Kuan Wood, this year’s iteration will bring together over 50 international and local artists and musicians, transforming the museum into a space of listening, gathering, improvising, and exploring alternative ways to perceive and apply what we learned from the recent pandemic. The biennial will be on view from November 18 through March 24, 2024 at Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, C. Spencer Yeh and Natascha Sadr Haghighian in collaboration with James T. Hong are amongst this year’s participating artists.
In a new publication accompanying the exhibition, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork: Like a Breath of Fresh Water at Visual Arts Center, The University of Texas at Austin, the artist was interviewed by Melissa Fandos. Read the full interview at the link below.
“At the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, form and function merge across works by Jes Fan, Nikita Gale, Hannah Levy, Ken Lum, and Oren Pinhassi.
Riffing off the term for any object within a building that is portable, curators Alex Klein and Cole Akers have created a spectrum that moves from readymade to sculpture in Moveables (18 August–17 December 2023)…
Materially, Levy’s works seem to defy fragility—a resistance that is accentuated by the sharpness of the artist’s sculptural forms. Jes Fan‘s compositions, on the other hand, lean into their precarity. Diagram XXI (2021), for instance, layers fine, leaf-like, sea-green aqua-resin sheets cast from parts of the body on a wall to create wave-like shelves that encase a bulbous blown-glass glass drop within their folds. In Rack II (2022), resin sheets hang like wet towels from a green metal rack alongside glass lumps.” Read more …
Tiffany Leung has contributed a new feature on Cici Wu’s Belonging and Difference to ArtAsiaPacific‘s November/December 2023 issue #136:
The pink dolphin of the Pearl River Delta is a lost species, long associated with Hong Kong but now more mythical than real as its numbers have dwindled to the point of extinction. The memory of them, or the imagination of them, as cultural signifiers, returns anew in Cici Wu’s new lantern sculpture Foreign Object No.2 Umbra and Penumbra (Dolphin) (2023). Constructed with bamboo and rice paper, the various shaped lanterns she has made in recent years are central to her practice. They become visionary devices, illuminating the darkness and casting undefined shapes, light, and shadows, as if animating the ways our memories can be transformed and resurface in unexpected ways, invoking the interplay between our identity and memory.
Professor Ari Heinrich will deliver the 2023 A.R.Davis Memorial Lecture at the Australian Society for Asian Humanities on the topic of Jes Fan’s Sydney Biennale works on October 26th at 5PM Sydney time.
This talk considers sculptural installations at the 2020 Sydney Biennale by the artist Jes Fan that incorporate biological materials like melanin, blood, and semen. But it also considers the Biennale’s decolonial interventions at the curatorial level, and how the significance of using biological materials in art changed with the onset of the pandemic. Heinrich argues that the 2020 Sydney Biennale anticipated this fundamental transition in uncanny ways, perhaps most significantly in its attention to location on Indigenous land and its disruption of linear viewing practices.
CURRENT EXHIBITION: Back | Doris Guo December 8, 2023 – February 17, 2024
1 December – February 25, 2024 recent work 2023: Tishan Hsu Secession, Vienna
23 September – 14 January, 2024 Sigg Prize 2023 Jes Fan, ‘Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2’
