Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce Sites of Wounding: Interchapter, an exhibition of new works by Jes Fan, the Brooklyn-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.
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.
In contrast, new works from the projects’ third chapter extends to an organism that is impervious to injury. In this chapter, Fan studies the soybean, and examines its machine-like ability for transformation. Soy has become invulnerable to all types of invasions, and has become one of the highest yield crops in global agriculture. While previously, works in Sites of Wounding have drawn on the artist’s own body, here sheets of yuba, or soy skins, are intuitively draped over metal armatures. Their folds and curves suggest that of human skin, alluding to the racialized idea of “yellow” skin. An aluminum basin sits in the corner of the gallery holding a pool of silicone and capsules filled with soybeans, both capturing the transient state of transformation between solid and liquid.
A group of drawings depict wood burls, knobby growths often found on the base of trees that result from infections, which develop intricate grain patterns in the process. Resembling keloids or scar tissue, these works reinforce the connections between the natural world and corporeal forms. Seen together with Fan’s sculptural works, they additionally underscore the unseen processes that shape our bodies, and in turn, our interactions with the outside world, especially as these become increasingly mediated by technology.
Jes Fan lives and works in Brooklyn and Hong Kong. In 2026, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven will present a solo exhibition of Fan’s work.This year, Fan was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and Greater Art Toronto. Recently, Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2 was on view at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong for the 2023 Sigg Prize exhibition. In 2022, Fan participated in The Milk of Dreams The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Cecilia Alemani, Venice. Additionally, Fan’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2022, Breaking Water, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, 2022, Soft Water Hard Stone, The Fifth New Museum Triennial, New Museum, New York, 2021, The Stomach and the Port, Liverpool Biennale, United Kingdom, 2021, NIRIN, Biennale of Sydney, Australia, 2020, The Socrates Annual 2019, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, 2019. Fan was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2022.