Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Diagram series relates broadly both to Jes Fan’s interests in body modification and gender hacking as well as the artist’s investment in destabilizing hegemonic categories such as gender, monogamy, and the classical individuated subject in favor of more creative, egalitarian, and communal modes of envisioning ourselves. As a whole, the series consists of forms which originate from the bodies of Fan’s milieu of friends and collaborators in New York. Fan first creates a mould of a concrete anatomical feature on a specific body which captures their attention (for example: the pectorals or biceps).