OPENINGS: JES FAN
IN 2018, Jes Fan, then in residence at Brooklyn arts nonprofit Recess, approached a local for-hire synthetic-biology lab with an unusual request. The artist, whose conceptually and materially complex work often showcases his facility with glassblowing—which he sharpened while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design—commissioned the laboratory to synthesize eumelanin for use as a sculptural material. The black or brown biopigment is found in organisms across taxonomic kingdoms. Among humans, however, it is racialized matter, synonymous with phenotypic constructions that have historically been deployed to naturalize structural oppression and violence, framing skin color as something that must be tracked and policed. Fan, who splits his time between New York and Hong Kong, where he was raised, is cognizant of racist schemata in which people of color are cast as potential contaminants to whiteness—a hideously tenacious idea that has informed American anti-miscegenation laws and that led to the violent stigmatization of Asian populations during the Covid-19 pandemic. The eumelanin, sloshing darkly in its test tubes for the artist’s early projects at Recess, materially foregrounded this racialized contagion discourse: Fan had the substance engineered using E. coli, bacteria present in healthy human and animal intestines but also famously capable of causing infection (and infectious panic).
Fan filled dimpled, droopy blown-glass globes with translucent silicone, used as a soft-tissue substitute for cosmetic or reconstructive plastic surgery, and injected it with the fetishized and feared eumelanin. A window onto the enmeshment of nature and culture, the glossy vessels—their interiors now richly filamented, spattered, and flecked—put the construction of race on display, the glass cells sagging like wilted vivaria under the material’s projected meaning. In his 2018 “Systems” series, the artist presented these vesicles alongside others containing ready-made chemicals such as pharmaceutical estrogen and testosterone, which he began working with around the time of his own transition. Commodified, legislated, and pathologized with cruel vigor amid bans on gender-affirming care, these hormones are, as scholar Sophie X. Guo has written, tangled up with what Paul B. Preciado has termed the “pharmacopornographic era,” in which control and resistance operate on the biomolecular level. Fan arranged the assorted globules in fleshy, resin-and-silicone-coated scaffolding, conjuring the concertina’d systems—chemical, medical, legal, informatic, technological, economic, biopolitical—through which such molecules typically travel. The suspension of their flow by the “Systems” sculptures hints at the potential for these substances to be powerfully reconceptualized or literally reconfigured: hacked, disordered, made unmanageable.
Evoking the slice-and-dice aesthetic of medical illustrations, the corporeal is fragmented and repeated (“cloned”) to the point of illegibility in Fan’s ongoing “Diagrams” series, 2018–. Again, literalism begets abstraction: After applying silicone directly to body parts (a nape, a shoulder blade) belonging to queer friends, lovers, or himself, Fan scrambles distinctions between interior and exterior by making casts from the molds. He sands the resultant Aqua-Resin carapaces to an erotically smooth, mottled finish and installs them as if they were modular shelving. Their sloping surfaces bear blistered glass sacs, which faintly call to mind nineteenth-century Chinese painter Lam Qua’s sensual portraits of men and women afflicted by severe tumors—the patients of an American doctor and missionary by the name of Peter Parker. (Several reproductions of these works are tacked onto the walls of Fan’s studio.) The transfiguration of flesh into furniture emphasizes the biopolitical alienation and biomedical commodification of the human body and its parts; it also implies an ontological fluidity or lability wherein a body could be anything.
Fan is cognizant of racist schemata in which people of color are cast as potential contaminants to whiteness.
The rangy, celadon-colored roots that hold together an abstracted corpus in sculptures such as Left torso, four times, 2023, literalize Fan’s fondness for “stolonic strategies,” a concept introduced by neuroscientist Deboleena Roy in her 2018 book Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab. The idea is based on stoloniferous grass, which grows horizontally across the surface of the ground and constantly puts out “feelers.” Roy locates an ethics in the organism’s “reaching toward and touching of an always unfixed and incompletely knowable other, in search of a response—any response,” without any expectation. In his own stolonic thinking, Fan’s feelers have increasingly crept toward matters of nonhuman life via his explorations of other organisms’ materiality, modes of being, and entanglement with humans (an interpenetration that is quite apparent in his use of hormones and melanin derived from soy and E. coli, respectively). For his 2021 “Networks” series, Fan cultivated black mold, which is both a contaminant that causes adverse health effects and a substance used for food preservation. Out of his care for and attunement to this other form of life emerged filaments that snaked through a sprawling glass reticulation evoking test tubes while upending the clinical glassware’s isolationist verticality.
“Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option,” writes anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), a book that examines the social lives of matsutake. In other words, we can be damaged or extinguished by such contact, but it can also occasion growth, resilience, or beauty. In his ongoing “Sites of Wounding” project, the first chapter of which was presented at Empty Gallery in Hong Kong between March and June of this year, Fan highlighted organically occurring instances where “the site of contamination becomes the site of regeneration.” To defend against foreign objects that slip into their shells, oysters secrete nacreous layers that transform the contaminant into a pearl. In a material-semiotic project undertaken with Hong Kong scientists between 2020 and 2023, the artist implanted the mantles of native Akoya oysters with small, sculptural Chinese characters for “Pearl of the Orient,” a colonialist moniker for Hong Kong. The irritated mollusks responded by covering the characters with nacre—the process unfurled like a slow, lustrous embossing. This poetic act of biohacking metaphorizes colonialism as a vector of infection, as it so often literally has been—something that postcolonial subjectivity responds to like an antibody. The video Palimpsest, 2023, portrays an ambivalent interspecies interaction marked by care as well as by violence; scenes of oyster cultivation (a practice in Hong Kong that predates British colonization) are intercut with close-up shots of Fan prying open the mollusks and the angry bubbling of their soft yellow mantles, studded with the occasional pearl. I WANT IT TO SWALLOW ITS OWN NAME, reads a caption along the bottom of the screen.
The next chapter of “Sites of Wounding” opens at Hong Kong’s M+ museum this month and builds on Fan’s exploration of generative contamination as well as on his interest in human bodies via biomedical aestheticization; the ways in which they are valued, commodified, parceled out, and atomized; and their capacity for transformation and resistance. Fan made casts of computed tomography scans of his own organs and bones, which he abstracted through shifts in scale. Inspired by the ancient practice of consecrating statues of Buddha—which was done by hiding scrolls, herbs, ashes, and human viscera inside of them—Fan embedded several sculptures into the walls of M+, allowing blown-glass components to ooze through its holes and cracks. The glass’s brown hue mimics that of agarwood, a resinous material that is formed via fungal infection and is used in luxury perfumes, religious ceremonies, and traditional medicine. The heartwood, long cultivated in China, has a potent balsamic aroma, which might be the reason Hong Kong (the phrase translates to “Fragrant Harbor” in English) is so named. A tiered sculpture trails its stolons on the floor and they extend toward something unknown, anticipating new connections to the outside world with an inherent bravery.
Cassie Packard is an art writer based in Brooklyn.
