Jes Fan

1/1

*Contrapposto*, *Cross Section (Right Leg Muscle II)*, *Cross Section (Right Leg Muscle III)*, *Gut* on view at Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing, March 20 – August 20, 2024. Organized by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator and Meg Onli, Curator at Large, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes. Photography: Ron Amstutz

Installation view, Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing, March 20 – August 20, 2024. Organized by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator and Meg Onli, Curator at Large, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes. Photography: Ron Amstutz

Jes Fan, *Gut,* 2024, 3D print of artist’s internal organ, fiberglass, resin, pigment, glass, metal, 35.36 x 78.74 x 21.59 cm

Jes Fan, *Adductor* 2024, pigmented polymer-modified gypsum, glass, 40.64 x 40.64 x 30.48 cm

Installation views, Jes Fan, Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2, Sigg Prize 2023

Courtesy of M+ Museum, Hong Kong
Photography: Michael Yu

Jes Fan, *Bivalve II,* 2023. Aqua resin, glass, pigments and metal. 135.3 x 88.9 x 34.9 cm.

Left: *Wounding*, 2022. Middle: *Fragrant Harbor*, 2022. Right: *Apparatus*, 2022.

Installation view, The 59th La Biennale di Venezia 2022: ‘The Milk of Dreams’

Jes Fan, *Fragrant Harbour*, 2022. Glass, aqua resin, metal, wood, silicone, 190 x 114 x 79 cm.

Installation view of *Network (for Dispersal)*, 2021, at Liquid Ground, UCCA Dune, 2022
Photography by Sun Shi
Courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

Installation view from ‘The Stomach and the Port,’ Liverpool Biennial, 2021

Image courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Biennial 2021
Photo: Stuart Whipps

Installation view from 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN

Image courtesy of the artist and 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Jes Fan (b. Scarborough, Canada) lives and works in Hong Kong and Brooklyn, USA. Fan originally trained in glass making, but has expanded his practice to encompass diverse mediums and approaches. From videos to sculptures, his trans-disciplinary practice speculates on the intersection of biology and identity in relation to the materiality of the gendered and racialised body. Fan is the recipient of various fellowships and residencies, including Creative Capital Wild Futures Grant (2024), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2022), Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2017), as well as the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019-2020).

Recent exhibitions include Hessel Museum of Art; Bard College, K11 Foundation, Hong Kong (2024); Gió Marconi Gallery, Milan, Ballroom Marfa, Texas, KADIST, San Francisco, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, (2023); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, MIT List Visual Arts Center, UCCA Dune (2022); Kunsthall Trondheim (2021); X Museum (2020); Rockbund Art Museum, China (2019); Hayward Gallery, UK (2019); Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2018); and Museum of Arts and Design, USA (2017). Fan has also participated in numerous artist residencies with institutions including the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Recess Art, Smack Mellon and Pioneer Works. He also participated in the Whitney Biennial; Greater Toronto Art: Triennial (2024), Venice Biennale (2022), New Museum Triennial (2021), Liverpool Biennale (2021), Sydney Biennale (2020), Socrates Annual (2019). In 2023, he presented a second solo show with Empty Gallery, Sites of Wounding: Chapter 1. He presented Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2 at M+ Museum, Hong Kong as a 2023 Sigg Prize finalist.

CURRENT:
Sites of Wounding: Interchapter
55 Walker, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
October 25 –⁠ December 20, 2024

Scientia Sexualis
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
October 5, 2024 –⁠ March 2, 2025

Dream States
Groundspace, Metropolitan Museum of Manila
August 22, 2024 –⁠ January 2025

Press:

Jenny Wu, Whitney Biennial 2024 Review: Baby Steps, ArtReview, March 21
Emily Watlington, “A Whitney Biennial with No Heroes and No Villains”, Art in America
Sebastian Smee, “A superb Whitney Biennial, marred by flimsy politics”, The Washington Post
Jason Farago, Travis Diehl and Martha Schwendener, “Dozens of Artists, 3 Critics: Who’s Afraid of the Whitney Biennial 2024?”, New York Times
Alex Greenberger, “A Blazing, Brilliant Whitney Biennial Heralds a New Kind of Body Art”, ARTnews

Jes Fan_Bio CV
DOWNLOAD pdf (227 KB)

Jes-Fan-press-archive Updated July 23
DOWNLOAD pdf (40.8 MB)


2024-10-26	Cici Wu, Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising, Scheusal Berlin
	Cici Wu’s solo exhibition Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising is now on view at Scheusal Berlin from October 26th onwards.
2024-10-25	Jes Fan, Sites of Wounding: Interchapter, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
	Jes Fan’s debut New York solo exhibition is now on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery’s 55 Walker space through December 20, 2024. In his practice, Fan employs the often invisible substances that shape our experiences with the world to explore the often malleable ways in which biology, ecology and identity intersect. Working in close collaboration with biologists, farmers, and medical universities, Fan’s transdisciplinary projects examine how sculpture can be used as a tool to unravel material from its accumulated history. The exhibition continues Fan’s episodic project Sites of Wounding, first initiated in 2020. A pool of boiling soy milk is positioned at the gallery’s entrance, and utilized as a projection surface for a visceral video documenting a homemade endoscopy. Upon looking at the congealed skin-like surface of the white liquid, the viewer is not offered a reflection, but instead offered an interior view of the artist’s body. This underscores a larger interest in Fan’s work, of collapsing the membrane that demarcates the external body from an internal space. New sculptures belonging to the project’s second chapter are informed by Fan’s research into Agarwood trees, as well as an interest in how injuries are capable of generating new meaning. Native to Hong Kong, the trees produce a fragrant resin in response to stress, and trauma. In the healing process, the tree’s fibers harden, building density and structure around the wound. To create sculptures in this chapter, Fan 3D prints CT scans of his own musculature and combines traditional techniques such as glass-blowing. Mimicking the formal qualities of the infected Agarwood tree, these abstracted forms point to the transformative potential of trauma carried by the human body. A punctured freestanding wall furthers this inquiry, inviting viewers to peer at the sculpture embedded within it. Read more …
2024-10-09	Jes Fan in Scientia Sexualis at ICA Los Angeles
	Scientia Sexualis is an ambitious group survey of contemporary artists whose works take up the fraught relationship between sex, gender, and science. Organized by Jennifer Doyle (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) and Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies, University of Kansas), the exhibition is realized as part of the ambitious collaboration across arts institutions throughout Southern California known as PST ART: Art & Science Collide led by the Getty. It runs from October 5, 2024 through March 2, 2025. Featured artists include: Panteha Abareshi, Dotty Attie, Louise Bourgeois, Nao Bustamante, Andrea Carlson, Demian DinéYazhi’, Nicole Eisenman, El Palomar, dean erdmann, Jes Fan, Nicki Green, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, Xandra Ibarra, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Joseph Liatela, Candice Lin, Carlos Motta, Wangechi Mutu, Young Joon Kwak & Gala Porras-Kim, Cauleen Smith, P. Staff, Joey Terrill, Chris E. Vargas, Millie Wilson, and Geo Wyex. Read more …
2024-09-27	James T. Hong at Argo Factory, Tehran
	I Am Standing in the Middle of the Information Highway and Laughing is a new exhibition curated by Raha Raissnia and Martin Germann, opening August 16 through October 18 at the Argo Factory in Tehran. Taking its title from late artist Jonas Mekas’ Manifesto Anti-100 years of Cinema, a performative exhibition in Tehran will unfold over two different episodes. Its main aim is to celebrate the unbound energy of collaborative work and friendship on the one hand and moments of reflection and stillness on the other. Its point of departure is the Manichean binary between darkness and light, as sine qua non condition for the existence of technologically mediated images. The second chapter of the exhibition, curated by Martin Germann, opens on Friday, September 27, with Marco Fusinato, James T. Hong, Tiffany Sia and Sam Lewitt. Read more …
2024-09-22	Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork in Slipper, Personal Space, Vallejo, California
	Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork is participting in the group exhibition Slipper at Personal Space, Vallejo, California. Featuring works by: David Bayus, Lemia Monet Bodden, Kari Cholnoky, Ximaps Dong, Erik Frydenborg, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Albert Herter, Catalina Ouyang, and Elina Vainio. “Slipping between registers, like prophesy, some excessive field leaves deposits in our shared existence. It takes form, in the shape of slips of the tongue, or a slipped disc, articulated and yet still monstrous. The environment is overpopulated by tools and weapons that encode our lust or aggression into metal, plastic, or paper, infused with the unspeakable. Here is a collection of objects, of various media, that cannot be fully accounted for, that leave a remainder or lapsus, that aren’t completely discrete, and sit like cairns on a landscape, death’s representatives, recording trajectories between past and future. Marking the differences that matter, that can be utilized to situate oneself and guide a famished party. Small signs, like fragments of fossils, can refer to immensity.” – Albert Herter Read more …
2024-09-20	Vunkwan Tam in Improvisation at Inside Out Museum, Beijing, curated by Carol Yinghua Lu
	Improvisation is on view through January 19th, 2025 at the Inside Out Museum in Beijing. It was curated by Carol Yinghua Lu with Na Rongkun, Sining Zhu, Cao Liyao, Li Huiyi and Sun Yuhan. Participating artists and collectives include Cang Xin, Chen Liang, Chen Zhou, Ergao (He Qiwo), Gao Fu, He Liping, He Ruijun, Hu Yiyao, Liu Zhan, Luo Lin, M Art Group, Ma Liuming, Pak Sheung Chuen, Peng Xueying, Rong Rong, The Cement Park, Song Xiaohong, Song Dong, Vunkwan Tam, Tong Tianqing, Wang Shihua, Wang Sishun, Yorkson, Zhang Huan, Zhang Wei, Zhang Zhihui, Zhong Yunshu, Zhou Bin, Zhu Fadong, Zuoxiao Zuzhou. Improvisation is one of the characteristics of art, as well as a method of creative practice. It highlights an artistic process where the artist finishes their work immediately and swiftly, using everything at hand, when the inspiration, provoked by an external stimulus or an internal impulse, hits unpreparedly and uncontrollably. In the context of traditional Chinese music culture, due to its unique system of notation and inheritance, improvisation was once a ubiquitous technique in musical practice. Improvisation is a cross-cultural phenomenon that is probably as old as the human race. This is the reason why we encounter improvisation frequently throughout different historical moments and creative activities in the long history of art. From the Dada’s rejection of logic and introduction of chaos and irrationality into their creative practice, to the Situationists who, out of an ideal to fight against Capitalism’s alienation of the individual, advocated the pursuit of genuine desires, the experience of life, and the sense of adventure. People can see that improvisation is the method, the idea, the principle, and the real life itself. Read more …
2024-09-19	Empty Gallery Staff Announcement
	Empty Gallery is pleased to announce the appointment of Alexander Lau as senior director, and Kaitlin Chan as director. Lau has served as director of the gallery, and its associated label Empty Editions, for over nine years, and been foundational in the development of our exhibition program and artist roster. Based in New York and Hong Kong, Lau also sits on the board of Primary Information (NYC). Chan joined the gallery in 2020 as associate, and has since contributed to over ten exhibitions as an artist liaison, as well as through public programming, communications, art fairs and sales. Chan is also a cultural worker who creates comics and lectures on self-publishing amongst other topics.
2024-09-19	Henry Shum in Bodily Powers at Crèvecœur, Paris
	Bodily Powers is now on view at Galerie Crevecouer (9 rue des Cascades, Paris) through November 2, 2024. Participating artists include Koichi Enomoto, Ester Knapová, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Autumn Ramsey, Emma Reyes, Margaret Salmon and Henry Shum. Read more …
2024-09-17	Taro Masushio in formazione di forme.. curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi at Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna
	formazione di forme.. curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi at Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna, as part of curated by 2024, is on view from 17 September through October 19, 2024. The exhibition features works by Alighiero Boetti, Aria Dean, Taro Masushio, and Samson Young, chosen for their distinct approach to form-making. Masushio took the Untitled (Youth) pictures in San Francisco in the early aughts, at a time of youthful infatuation with the aesthetics and techniques of formalist photography. He shot the SoMa scene through that lens: analog camera and the zone system, the body flattened and closely cropped in black-and-white symmetries. Finding those negatives in his archive last summer arose feelings of embarrassment toward his puppy love days. An embarrassment that he worked through, coming face to face with that innocent attraction to formalism, and by extension to a younger self, that is akin to kink. So that in the printing process, he treated the negatives to further heighten the compositional elements in ways that replay the darkroom devotion of his youth. Masushio said: “Vis-à-vis my personal history, I want to propose a provocation of (modernist?) aesthetics and the taboo of being a formalist, which I thought was kind of kinky. (A kind of parallel between concept/ form vs norm/ taboo). But there is always a bit of embarrassment about making these kinds of (po-mo) gestures, too.” The form/ affect dyad shifts valence from attraction to embarrassment to kink in the reception of these works. Which is real? This fractal approach to the archive is typical of his overall method. An earlier body of work emerged from fortuitously finding, in a temporary lodging, a box of prints and recognizing them as the work of the late Jun’icha En’ya—an elusive figure and one of the earliest Japanese photographers of homoerotica. A visit to En’ya’s environs in Osaka generated Masushio’s works: photographs of pencil-traced snapshots that he furtively took in En’ya’s archives, and still-life pictures of the objects that En’ya owned or that he might have. Between Masushio and the En’ya “idea” there is no articulated relationship of influence. Form escapes filiation there: the pressure of the archival materials and the pencil pressing against paper. Read more …
2024-09-07	Tishan Hsu in Interface Remix, MoCA Toronto
	Tishan Hsu’s solo exhibition Interface Remix at MOCA Toronto opens to the public on Sunday, September 8.  “Interface Remix” showcases key works from the past five decades of Hsu’s career alongside never-before-seen creations that explore themes of transformation and alienation. In his first ever Canadian solo exhibition, Hsu’s groundbreaking work navigates the intersection of technology and the human body through his multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture, and installation. Hsu will also be in conversation with Alex Da Corte on September 8th at 2PM in an accompanying program. Read more …

Bodily Powers is now on view at Galerie Crevecouer (9 rue des Cascades, Paris) through November 2, 2024.