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, like hormones, and melanin, to explore the often malleable ways in which biology and identity intersect. Working in close collaboration with marine biologists, farmers, and medical universities, Fan’s projects interweave research and technology to examine how material can influence our understanding of race and gender.
The exhibition continues Fan’s episodic project Sites of Wounding, first initiated in 2020. New sculptural works 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 value and meaning. Native to eastern China, the trees produce a fragrant resin used extensively in perfumery, known as Oud, in response to stress, and trauma. In the healing process, the tree’s fibers harden, building density and structure around the wound. Taking CT scans of his own musculature and stomach, Fan combines 3-D printing, with traditional techniques such as glass-blowing, to create his sculptures. Mimicking the formal qualities of the infected Agarwood tree, these abstracted forms point to the transformative potential of trauma carried by the queer body. A punctured freestanding wall furthers this inquiry, inviting viewers to peer at the sculptures embedded within it.
In contrast, new works from the projects’ third chapter are centered on organisms that are impervious to injury. Incorporating soy in the form of yuba, or tofu skin, Fan looks at how the ubiquitous crop, through decades of human intervention has become immune to both disease and the elements. While previously, works in Sites of Wounding have drawn on the artist’s own body, or those of his friends and a larger queer community, here sheets of yuba are intuitively draped over metal armatures. Their folds and curves suggest that of human flesh, particularly the racialized idea of “yellow” skin, a reference to the objectification of Asian bodies. Soy as a material also opens the works to new meanings, including the term “soy boys”, a derogatory term for effeminate Asian men, as well as soy’s many pragmatic uses, from food, to bio-resin, as well as pharmaceutical hormones.
A group of drawings depict wood burls, knobby growths often found on the base of trees that result from viral or fungal infections, which develop intricate grain patterns in the process. Installed atop a wall covered in Fan’s own reference images, ranging from the anatomical to personal, these works begin to resemble keloids or scar tissue, reinforcing 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 experiences with the world, especially as these become increasingly mediated by technology.
Jes Fan lives and works in Brooklyn and Hong Kong. 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.
