I first encountered Jes Fan’s work in my Asian art history class last semester in the windowless Loria 351. Within minutes of seeing Fan’s art, I went from falling asleep in the lecture hall to falling in love with the strange and erotic nature of his work. A trans Canadian immigrant artist based between Brooklyn and Hong Kong, Fan was originally trained in the art of glassmaking, but his processes have grown to include resin, wax, and soap. He is not afraid to expand his definition of art to include the unconventional. From creating estrogen out of his own mother’s urine and candles made from testosterone, Fan incorporates conversations about technology, race, and sexuality into his art, questioning structures of gender and attitudes of racial fetishization through his use of otherwise taboo mediums (not excluding fungus, squid ink, fungi, E. coli, and isolated melanin).
Mother is a Woman, perhaps Fan’s most well-known work is a video installation in which he turns his mother’s urine into facial cream by isolating the estrogen within it. Complementing this video projection were samples of the cream for the audience to experience themselves, to feel this same “kinship” towards Fan’s mother. This act transforms his mother’s excretion into a commercial product. At the beginning of the video, viewers have no information beyond the fact that the ingredients are “single origin” supplied—only later does he reveal the origin. Ensuing clips of women putting on the cream only strengthens this irony, as Fan makes the viewer question the lengths one goes to attain ultimate femininity.
Fan’s creation process—also prominently featured in the video with sounds and clips of the lab equipment used—was not without difficulty: behind-the-scenes obstacles included countless rejections for lab spaces, an international flight to acquire the urine, and the intense chemical process by which he extracted the estrogen itself. The medium of beauty cream that Fan chose questions the entire beauty industry as it relates to racial minorities, given the history of estrogen creams and other “lightening” creams for people of color to use. Furthermore, the cream—and how Fan introduces the key ingredient—highlights the underlying tensions in the beauty industry, where exotic ingredients are used in products without consideration of their homelands. This ties into Jes Fan’s work and his message on racialization, where people of color are often disadvantaged and thought of as sources of exploitation without careful consideration.
Watching this video was hard. During my first viewing experience in our lecture, I saw confused, and even some disgusted, stares from classmates. In our discussion, fewer people seemed to want to talk about this work compared to others. On my second watch, I showed the video to my boyfriend, whose reaction was a confused fascination that mirrored my own. My third watch was alone on the Metro North, during which I spent far more time analyzing the audio details of the lab and the sounds of cream being slathered rather than considering my feelings. Months later, I still find myself pondering the reveal of the cream’s key ingredients when applying face cream in the morning. Where do the ingredients come from? And what am I really striving towards when using this cream? Thinking back on it again and again, perhaps it’s the haunt, not the shock, that Fan was trying to achieve.
Fan’s intersectional identity—especially relating to his gender—is made manifest in Mother is a Woman. In a profile by Wallpaper Magazine, he explains the piece further: “When you’re trans, you think, ‘My body is just a material that I can manipulate in a way.” Fan’s perspective on the body speaks not just to his gender but also to his treatment of bodies as a whole—the manipulation of fluids into something commercial, something isolated from its origin, speaks to the diaspora experience and the ways of biopolitics. As Fan’s transgender background informs his work, Mother is a Woman is also a piece about this gendering process: the hormones helping regulate this gender experience are isolated from the body, becoming something foreign.
Forniphilia, Fan’s 2018 sculptural work, features two blob-shaped, spotted glass objects, appearing to be mottled nipples and vaginal openings which are pierced, atop a fur pedestal. By definition, forniphilia is a term related to fetish and bondage photography, in which a person’s body is contorted into the shape of a chair, table, or other piece of furniture. Fan exploits this interpretation to create something that fetishizes and degrades the glass by shaping it into inherently sexual forms. The viewer partakes in this degradation by becoming a voyeur of these parts. This act of objectification and othering parallels the sexual objectification of the racial other; the fur, speaking to the “exoticness” of diasporic backgrounds, accompanies the glass’s sexual curvatures. The mottled coloration of the glass form also parallels the push-and-pull dynamic of the diaspora, where one feels “too Asian” to be American and “too American” to identify as Chinese. As Fan mentions in a Living Content interview, “As someone whose work is situated in a state of flux, being geographically buoyant and not claiming one home or one specific culture, is really important for me.”
Systems II, a large-scale 2018 sculpture made of composite resin, glass, melanin, estradiol, depo-testosterone, silicone, and wood, adds the final touch to the freakiness of Fan’s metaphorical explorations. Fan draws upon his experience in glassmaking, combining hand-blown glass forms with casts made from sections of human bodies, turning them into alien forms bearing flesh-colored tones. In the installation, glass pieces bloated with melanin, testosterone, and estrogen sag over metal beams, creating a contrast between the binaries of gender and restrictions. The glass forms appear in a shape akin to breast implants, and the structured grids are sanded to reveal the texture of skin, further addressing the artificiality of gender and contrasting identities.As Fan describes, “Maybe [this is] the ultimate truth: these highly politicized substances —melanin, but also urine, semen, blood—are actually just so abstract…Trying to search for some biological truth of gender or race, say, in progesterone or melanin is bald-facedly absurd…the ‘truth’ of these categories is that they are socially constructed.” Perhaps Fan’s work lives in this experience of the body in abstraction: an intermediary where sex lives in a space beyond binary statements.