Jes Fan

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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 the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2022), Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2017), as well as the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019-2020). Recent exhibitions include 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 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. Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2 is now on view as part of M+ Museum’s Sigg Prize 2023 exhibition.

He is jointly represented by Empty Gallery and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

Current:

Perhaps The Truth
Ballroom Marfa, Texas
October 4, 2023 – March 30, 2024

Sigg Prize 2023 exhibition
M+ Museum, Hong Kong
September 23, 2023 – January 14, 2024

Moveables
ICA Philadelphia
August 18 ⁠–⁠ December 17, 2023

Industrial Rhapsody, Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, Munich
April 28, 2023 –⁠ January 26, 2024

Motherboy, Gió Marconi, Milan
Curated by Stella Bottai and Gray Wielebinski
November 24, 2023 – February 17, 2024

UPCOMING:

Greater Toronto Triennial, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto
Curated by Kate Wong, Ebony L. Haynes, and Toleen Touq
March 23 – July 28, 2024

Recent Press:

Alex Yiu, Confronting Divergent Realities at the Sigg Prize 2023, ArtAsiaPacific
Stephanie Bailey, Form and Function Come Alive at ICA, Philadelphia, Ocula
M+, ‘Jes Fan: Beyond Appearances‘ (video)
Cassie Packard, “The Art of Jes Fan“, Artforum

Jes Fan_Bio CV
DOWNLOAD pdf (193 KB)

Jes-Fan-press-archive
DOWNLOAD pdf (36.6 MB)


2023-11-24	Jes Fan at Gió Marconi, Milan
	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 Read more …
2023-11-23	Cici Wu at Galerie Crèvecœur, Paris
	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 Read more …
2023-11-18	Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork and C. Spencer Yeh at Taipei Biennial, 2023
	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. Read more …
2023-11-04	Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork interviewed at Visual Arts Center, The University of Texas at Austin
	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. Read more …
2023-11-01	Jes Fan at ICA Philadelphia in Ocula Magazine
	‘Form and Function Come Alive at ICA, Philadelphia’ by Stephanie Bailey: “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 …
2023-10-31	Cici Wu featured in ArtAsiaPacific
	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.
2023-10-24	Ari Heinrich to deliver lecture on Jes Fan's Sydney Biennale works
	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. Read more …
2023-10-19	Yutaka Matsuzawa at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
	Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living is now on view at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo until March 21, 2024. This exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of the museum’s founding, and endeavors to ask who we are, and to whom the Earth’s environment belongs. The exhibition urges us to think about environmental problems and other issues not only from an anthropocentric perspective but also by looking at the Earth’s multiple ecologies from a broader, more comprehensive standpoint. Yutaka Matsuzawa is amongst the 34 artists featured, with works spanning historical pieces to new commissions. Read more …
2023-10-14	Jes Fan at KADIST, San Francisco
	de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas [from the underwater mountains fire makes islands], guest curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel, explores the concept of freedom through sensory experiences, alternate and altered realities, and interspecies relationships between human and non-human entities. Featuring over a dozen local and international artists and collectives—the majority of which were culled from the KADIST collection—the exhibition unfolds over three rotations, drawing from the emancipatory potential of repetition and poses the question: how does art affect our bodies and perception, and how does it contribute to and alter our future? Rotation #1 is on view from October 13 – November 11, 2023 and includes Jonas Van & Juno B, Jes Fan, Duto Hardono, arquivo mangue, Dalissa Montes de Oca, Angela Su, Maria Taniguchi. Read more …
2023-10-04	Jes Fan at Ballroom Marfa, Texas
	Ballroom Marfa’s 20th year anniversary exhibition is Perhaps the Truth, featuring work by Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Jes Fan, Joel Gaitan, Florian Krewer, Rebecca Manson, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, Jesse Murry, Robert Nava, Ilana Savdie, Kiki Smith, Astrid Terrazas, Lucía Vidales, and Issy Wood. The exhibition will be on view from October 4 through March 30, 2024. Read more …