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 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 recently presented Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2 at M+ Museum, Hong Kong as a 2023 Sigg Prize finalist.

Current:

Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing
Curated by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes
March 20, – August 11, 2024

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

Boundless Reverie: Chinese Savoir-Faire and Contemporary Art
K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong
March 26 – May 19, 2024

Weight of Mind
Hessel Museum of Art, Bard University
Curated by Thalia Stefaniuk
April 6 – May 26, 2024

Recent Press:

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
Siddhartha Mitter, ‘Whitney Biennial Picks a ‘Dissonant Chorus’ of Artists to Probe Turbulent Times‘, New York Times
Maxwell Rabb, ‘Creative Capital announces the recipients of the 2024 “Wild Futures” art awards‘, Artsy

Jes Fan_Bio CV
DOWNLOAD pdf (203 KB)

Jes-Fan-press-archive Dec 2023
DOWNLOAD pdf (37.5 MB)


2024-04-27	Doris Guo at Artists Space, New York
	Opening May 23 through August 10: Artists Space is pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent work by Doris Guo, Matthew Langan-Peck, Isabelle Frances McGuire, and Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya. Read more …
2024-04-06	Jes Fan in Weight of Mind, Hessel Museum of Art
	Artists: Kaari Upson, Jes Fan, and Lucas Blalock Dates: April 6 – May 26, 2024 Weight of Mind at Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College questions how memory is embodied and given new form in the works of three artists: Kaari Upson, Jes Fan, and Lucas Blalock. In divergent ways, their works—across sculpture and photography—examine how past experiences are transformed through different methods of translation, from molding and casting to pigmentation to digital manipulation. By thickening fragmented memories or past sensations, the artists invite the audience to examine moments of change that otherwise would be fleeting. The exhibition is curated by Thalia Stefaniuk. Read more …
2024-03-24	Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork interviewed for BOMB
	Sound art as performance, choreography, and object. Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork by Byron Westbrook in BOMB: “Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s work occupies a singular space at a nexus of visual arts and sound composition. With a multifaceted sphere of influences that includes textiles, club music, archaeoacoustics, and choreography, she has one of the most rigorous and unique practices in what is often termed sound art. Her work manifests as a generous space for audience exploration, where sculpture, sound, and interactive installation environments live and breathe in a symbiotic collaboration with viewer and architecture. Kiyomi Gork’s first East Coast institutional solo exhibition, Poems of Electronic Air, at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center presents an expansive survey of her ideas and work. In the conversation below, I speak with her about concepts explored in the show, including participation, feedback systems, surveillance, choreography, and sonic forms as expressive metaphor.” —Byron Westbrook Read more …
2024-03-22	Jes Fan in 2024 Greater Toronto Art
	New works by Jes Fan are now on view at Greater Toronto Art, the triennial at MOCA Toronto, from March 22, 2024— July 28, 2024. The curatorial team includes MOCA Curator Kate Wong and two invited guest curators, Ebony L. Haynes and Toleen Touq. Greater Toronto Art 2024 (GTA24) is the second edition of MOCA Toronto’s recurring triennial exhibition, which was conceived in 2021 to look more closely and consistently at artistic practices with a connection to the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Featuring a constellation of twenty-five intergenerational artists, duos, and collectives, GTA24 looks back as much as it looks forward. The exhibition presents work made between the 1960s and the present, allowing the comingling of art created in different decades to provide new ways of understanding the current moment and imagining the future. Read more …
2024-03-18	Jes Fan in 2024 Whitney Biennial
	Empty Gallery congratulates Jes Fan on his participation in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Even Better Than The Real Thing. The Seventy-one visionary artists and collectives in the latest chapter of the exhibition—Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing—will follow in the footsteps of hundreds of Biennial artists before them to interpret our current landscape and tell stories, spark discussion, and comment on issues across a variety of media and disciplines. The curators of the 2024 Whitney Biennial are Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes. Even Better Than The Real Thing will be on public view starting 20 March 2024, with previews from 12 through 17 March 2024. In The New York Times, read Siddhartha Mitter’s coverage: Whitney Biennial Picks a ‘Dissonant Chorus’ of Artists to Probe Turbulent Times. Read more …
2024-03-15	Vunkwan Tam and Xper.Xr in Yokohama Triennale
	Now on view at Yokohama Museum of Art, Former Daiichi Bank Yokohama Branch, from March 15 – June 9, 2024: 8th Yokohama Triennale “ Wild Grass : Our Lives”. The Artistic Directors: Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu Vunkwan Tam and Xper. Xr are two of the ninety-four participating artists in the exhibition. The Artistic Directors, Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, started conceptualizing the theme with the Chinese writer Lu Xun’s anthology Wild Grass, penned from 1924 to 1926, during a turbulent period in Chinese history. In 20th-century China, Lu Xun was a singularly solitary individual who constantly rebelled against existing situations and simultaneously a thinker who stayed attentive to the movements of the world, contemplating the fate of individuals and humanity within them. In Wild Grass, Lu Xun affirmed his conviction to confront desperation and to find a way out of complete darkness. The exhibition theme Wild Grass: Our Lives aspires to Lu Xun’s philosophy of the universe. It signifies a way of life that elevates the unquenchable force of individuals to a respectable existence that transcends all systems, rules, regulations, and forms of control and power. It is a model for flexible expression of individual subjectivity. Read more …
2024-03-09	Raha Raissnia at H Queen's
	Drawing inspiration from the legendary Zaha Hadid, the architectural brilliance behind The Henderson, the exhibition showcases a collective of eight multidisciplinary women artists from diverse cultures, each forging visionary paths in their use of light as an artistic medium. Date: 9 March – 6 April 2024 Address: G/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central Opening hours: 11am – 8pm Participating artists: Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Carla Chan, Jacqueline Hen, Sarah Lai, Betty Ng / COLLECTIVE, So Wing Po, Raha Raissnia and Liz West. Raha Raissnia’s Nour will be on view.
2024-03-05	Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork in Frieze
	Cassie Packard profiles Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork in Frieze: ‘This city has a hum – a Manhattan-specific drone music – that I love,’ Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork tells me when we meet in New York, after installing her first institutional solo show on the East Coast – ‘Poems of Electronic Air’– at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. ‘Different parts of the city are characterized by markedly different sounds, down to patches where you can hear whooshes from the subway below.’ Sound – as material, process, system and event – is a phenomenon to which the Los Angeles-based artist is emphatically attuned. Born in Long Beach, California, Kiyomi Gork was ‘one of those kids who was always making art’ to make sense of the world, she says. She cut her teeth in a San Francisco noise band, playing homemade instruments like plastic inflatables rigged with contact microphones. After studying sound art at the now-defunct San Francisco Art Institute, she entered the MFA program at Stanford University, where she researched military sound technologies, and also became involved with the university’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, which was working to reconstruct original experiences of sound at archaeological sites. Read more …
2024-03-04	Tishan Hsu at MAMCO Genève
	Opening March 5th in collaboration with the Secession in Viennia, MAMCO Geneva is proud to present a solo exhibition of Tishan Hsu. The exhibition will be on view until June 9th, 2024. “For more than four decades, Tishan Hsu (b. 1951 in Boston, lives and works in New York) has used art to explore the relationship between technology and the human body. His sculptures, wall pieces, silkscreen prints and, more recently, videos examine the cognitive, physical and social implications of everyday encounters between people and machines. The spring 2024 exhibition at MAMCO will bring together pieces from various stages of Hsu’s career – from his earliest works in the 1980s to the present day. Developed with extensive input from the artist himself, the show is also a collaborative effort with the Secession in Vienna, which will host an exhibition of Hsu’s newer productions in late 2023. Some of these recent pieces are also on display at MAMCO.” Read more …
2024-02-22	Cici Wu in u – New Project Spaces at Kunsthalle Zürich
	Eyrie Alzate, Jason de Haan, Nancy Lupo, Na Mira, Malcolm Mooney, Yuki Okumura, Hikari Ono, Francesca Percival, Bea Schlingelhoff, Jo-ey Tang, Cici Wu, Bruno Zhu and u Opening: February 23, 7 pm u is part artist, part vessel—a transferable personal alias, and a social interaction. u’s project spaces (2018–ongoing) are small boxes made of clear packing tape that act as a medium for collaborations with other artists and curators. u initiates the process by sending an empty project space to selected practitioners as an invitation to join an artistic dialogue, a new relationship and often a finished artwork. Thus u also performs the role of a curator by providing each participant carte blanche within an exhibition space that is small, but very flexible. As a result, the individual collaborators are foregrounded, while the initiator takes a backseat behind the easily overlooked lowercase letter ‘u’ (shorthand for the English word ‘you’). This collaborative way of thinking and working deliberately resists elaborate, commercial production mechanisms and allows for collaborations far beyond national borders. The heart of the project is to expand the concept of curating to include the interests of artists and to promote artistic exchange. Read more …

Sound art as performance, choreography, and object. Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork by Byron Westbrook in BOMB: