User:Mobileironyvalve/sandbox

Jes Fan, born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong, is a Brooklyn-based artist interested in manipulating materials to explore notions of otherness. Fan received his BFA in Glass at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and frequently works with the material to explore the connection between theory and practice, experimenting with ways in which its formal properties can produce new conceptual thinking. Fan does not only work with glass but also employs a variety of abiotic and biotic materials like wood, silicone, resin, pigments (including the skin pigment, melanin), hormones and human hair. The objects, environments, performances and videos that result from the processes Fan develops in his studio engage with questions about the body's complex relationship to the variety of materials it produces and is produced from. Issues that Fan's practice addresses include materiality, identity politics, gender, techniques of racialization and labor. Fan is particularly interested in using transgender politics to expand restricted notions of the body and challenging conventional understandings of biology.

Fellowship at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Manhattan, New York

In 2017, Fan was commissioned to create a work especially for his solo exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan. For the occasion, he cast a 150-pound barbell into silicone and aqua resin which was then embedded into a glass sphere. The aim of the project--for which Fan worked with publicly accessible glass studios in Brooklyn and New Jersey--was to explore the limits of glass, a material already explored by the artist in the work WHATNOTS. Fan's project at the Museum of Arts and Design was also planned to educate visitors in the processes of glassmaking and moldmaking, techniques of working with materials that in the digital era are often associated with craft.