Xenophoria

2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
7:35 minutes

Jes Fan’s video work Xenophoria , as opposed to the term ‘xenophobia’, refers to a love of the foreign and is inspired by the name of a mysterious species of aquatic carrier shell. This creature, Xenophora pallidae, calcifies free-floating objects in the water to its spine, bringing foreign bodies into its own structure. Likewise, Xenophoria stages a delirious search for the melanin pigment – the molecule responsible for skin color – as it manifests in both human and non-human bodies. Referencing the aesthetics of both microscopic imagery and ASMR videos, the work depicts such actions as dissecting squids and bursting their ink sacs, tracing the discolored tumors within Qing Dynasty painter Lam Qua’s medical paintings, harvesting fungi, and locating bodily moles in an absurdist investigation of the substance of racial othering.

Jes Fan is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong. Speculating on the intersection of biology and identity, his trans-disciplinary practice emerges from a sustained inquiry into the concept of otherness as it relates to the materiality of the gendered body. Working primarily in expanded sculpture, Fan often incorporates organic materials—such as soybeans and depo-testosterone into larger assemblages fashioned of welded steel, poured resin, and hand-blown glass. His projects have focused on the bio-politics of transgender identity and the slippery nature of embodiment in an ear where HRT (hormone replacement therapy) and less extreme body-modification tactics such as bodybuiling are easily accessible, allowing the subject to mode their external body to match their internal state. Fan’s recent research has explored the complex and porous systems formed between biological agents (including those existing in our own body) and the surrounding environment, seeking to queer the traditional hierarchy between organic and inorganic matter.

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