When Jes Fan suspends biological materials—hormones, bacteria, blood—inside blown glass forms, it reflects a maker’s instinct as much as a conceptual one. Their sculpture, process-driven and exploratory, is rooted in material investigation.
Since graduating from the glass program at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014, Fan has expanded their practice beyond the hot shop, adding silicone, resin, and biological matter to their materials, and 3D printing, CT scanning, and casting to their slate of processes. Their first solo museum exhibition, Jes Fan: Unbounded, brings that breadth into focus. It’s on view at the Yale University Art Gallery through June 28.
Fan is drawn to materials that shift and change states. Those materials “facilitate the exploration of the ways in which things are rarely black and white, but rather, can have different qualities at different times,” says Margaret Ewing, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Yale University Art Gallery.
In Form Begets Function (2020), Fan precariously drapes blown glass capsules containing testosterone, melanin, and urine on a human-scale biomorphic rectangular lattice made of wood, fiberglass, and resin. The form itself references a classical Chinese scholar’s shelf used to display collections. By suspending the biological materials in glass, outside the context of the body, Fan explores the intersection of identity and biology and challenges constructs of gender and race, themes that they return to often in their work.
Form Begets Function, 2020, wood, polymer-modified gypsum, metal, glass, fiberglass, silicone, urine, testosterone, melanin, 76 x 50 x 16 in.
