Skip to main contentHanes Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Jes Fan
Jes Fan’s interdisciplinary practice explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and invisible substances, such as melanin and hormones, that shape how people experience the world. Through this process, Fan examines how these highly politicized materials inform understandings of the social constructs of race and gender, as well as the absurd pursuit of defining them as quantifiable amounts of material.
Originally trained in glassmaking, Fan combines hand-blown cellular glass forms with casts made from sections of human bodies in aqua resin and bearing uncanny, flesh-like tones. Removed from the context of the figure, these forms take on abstract qualities, repeated and distorted across architectural armatures, suggesting an experience of the body increasingly intertwined with and mediated by technology.
Jes Fan lives and works in Brooklyn and Hong Kong. Fan’s recent solo exhibition, Unbounded, was presented at Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven in 2026. In 2024, Andrew Kreps Gallery presented Sites of Wounding: Interchapter, Fan’s first solo exhibition in New York. That same year, Fan was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and Greater Art Toronto.
In 2023, Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2 was on view at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong as part of 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 in Venice.
Fan’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Scientia Sexualis at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2025; Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2022; Breaking Water at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati in 2022; Soft Water Hard Stone, the Fifth New Museum Triennial at the New Museum in New York in 2021; The Stomach and the Port at the Liverpool Biennial in 2021; NIRIN at the Biennale of Sydney in 2020; and The Socrates Annual 2019 at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens in 2019.
Fan was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2022.
Jes Fan’s interdisciplinary practice explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and invisible substances, such as melanin and hormones, that shape how people experience the world. Through this process, Fan examines how these highly politicized materials inform understandings of the social constructs of race and gender, as well as the absurd pursuit of defining them as quantifiable amounts of material.
Originally trained in glassmaking, Fan combines hand-blown cellular glass forms with casts made from sections of human bodies in aqua resin and bearing uncanny, flesh-like tones. Removed from the context of the figure, these forms take on abstract qualities, repeated and distorted across architectural armatures, suggesting an experience of the body increasingly intertwined with and mediated by technology.
Jes Fan lives and works in Brooklyn and Hong Kong. Fan’s recent solo exhibition, Unbounded, was presented at Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven in 2026. In 2024, Andrew Kreps Gallery presented Sites of Wounding: Interchapter, Fan’s first solo exhibition in New York. That same year, Fan was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and Greater Art Toronto.
In 2023, Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2 was on view at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong as part of 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 in Venice.
Fan’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Scientia Sexualis at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2025; Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2022; Breaking Water at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati in 2022; Soft Water Hard Stone, the Fifth New Museum Triennial at the New Museum in New York in 2021; The Stomach and the Port at the Liverpool Biennial in 2021; NIRIN at the Biennale of Sydney in 2020; and The Socrates Annual 2019 at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens in 2019.
Fan was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2022.
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