Can art and biology come together to break down social constructs?

Jes Fan: Multidisciplinary artist Jes Fan uses fungi, bacteria and hormones to produce unique pieces exploring the intersections of biology, identity and creativity

- By Drew Zeiba

‘I’m not interested in technique, I’m interested in process,’ says the Brooklyn-based artist Jes Fan of his approach. Trained in the Rhode Island School of Design’s famously conceptual glass department, Fan crafts with melanin and mould as much as glass or Aqua-Resin.

In his 2019 public project for Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY, for example, an interlocking resin-coated metal skeleton supported fleshy fibreglass blobs, like a body open to the air. In 2021, for the Liverpool Biennial and New Museum Triennial, Fan floated the fungus phycomyces in a maze- like grid of glass. Other projects have used squid ink, his mother’s urine, and E. coli.

Riffing on the title of the main exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale, ‘The Milk of Dreams’, Fan looked into udders for his installation at the Arsenale. Simultaneously, he took an interest in incense, developing his own incense cones. Fan was raised in Hong Kong, a city named after the Cantonese phrase for ‘incense harbour’, perhaps due to its many aquilaria trees. When the tree is cut, it often becomes infected with fungus, causing it to secrete an aromatic resin. Such resins are referred to as ‘tears’, which led Fan to the discovery that breast milk and emotional tears share similar hormonal characteristics. ‘There’s this through line of thinking of how beauty is produced through sites of wounding or infection,’ Fan notes.