Jes Fan (they/them) is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong, China. They are the recipient of various fellowships and residencies, such as the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant Recipient, Recess Art Session Residency, Bemis Center Residency, Van Lier Fellowship at Museum of Arts and Design, Pioneer Works Residency, John A. Chironna Memorial Award at RISD. Fan has exhibited in the United States and internationally; selected exhibitions include Mother is a Woman at Empty Gallery (Hong Kong), Disposed to Add at Vox Populi Gallery (Philadelphia), Whereabouts at Glazenhuis Museum (Belgium), Material Location at Agnes Varis Gallery (New York), Ot(her) at Brown University’s Sarah Doyle Gallery (Providence). They received a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design.

Fellowship Statement

My studio practice is rooted in a haptic approach to understanding how identity is materialized, biologically and ontologically. I use substances such as hormones, silicone and soap—materials that are imbued with erotic and political signifiers to articulate my concerns about diasporic politics, transgender identities, and posthumanism.



Currently, I am working on new film, titled Xenophoria. Xenophoria, at first glance, simulates a YouTube cooking video, but the narrative quickly dives into the lab process of melanin production. Here, E. coli bacteria is used as a host, allegorical to ways in which miscegenation has been viewed as a dangerous contamination, and broader anxieties of racial intimacy. The mood of the video shifts and the camera turns to medical portraitures of the 19th century by Lam Qua. A set of paintings that depicts tumors of patients in the Canton region. These paintings ascribe to a colonial period when race and character is still not fully taxonomized, and medical science was sought out as a tool to dissect race as a distinct category. The film ends with a sudden jolt to an interview with a researcher who proposed to harness melanin's anti-radioactive properties for interspace travel in the near future.



My work magnifies the surreal realities of existing as a biological body in the age where the body is reconceptualized in digital, informational and molecular terms. It dwells in this productive anxiety and offers no resolution to identity politics that are riven by binaries.

Photo by Han Minu.