Hanes Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Jes Fan
100 Hamilton Hall
Jes Fan’s interdisciplinary practice explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter, as well as invisible substances like melanin and hormones, that shape how we experience the world into their sculptures. Through this process, Fan looks at how these highly politicized materials form our understanding of the social constructs of race and gender, and the absurd pursuit of delimiting these as quantifiable amounts of material. Originally trained in glassmaking, Fan combines hand-blown cellular glass forms with casts made from sections of human bodies, in aqua resin and bearing uncanny flesh-like tones. Removed from the context of the figure, these forms take on abstract qualities, repeated and distorted across architectural armatures, suggesting an experience of the body increasingly intertwined with and mediated by technology
Jes Fan lives and works in Brooklyn and Hong Kong. Fan’s recent solo exhibition Unbounded was at Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, in 2026. In 2024, Andrew Kreps Gallery presented Sites of Wounding: Interchapter, Fan’s first solo exhibition in New York. The same year, Fan was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and Greater Art Toronto. In 2023, Sites of Wounding: Chapter 2 was on view at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong for the 2023 Sigg Prize exhibition. In 2022, Fan participated in The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Cecilia Alemani, Venice. Fan’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions: including Scientia Sexualis, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2025; Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2022; Breaking Water, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, 2022; Soft Water Hard Stone, The Fifth New Museum Triennial, New Museum, New York, 2021; The Stomach and the Port, Liverpool Biennale, United Kingdom, 2021; NIRIN, Biennale of Sydney, Australia, 2020; The Socrates Annual 2019, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, 2019. Fan was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2022.
An endowment established in 1983 through the generosity of Nancy and Robin Hanes supports the Art Department’s Visiting Artist Series. This important program brings both established and emerging artists to campus to discuss their work in public lectures and to offer individual critiques to our M.F.A. students. The Hanes Visiting Artist series greatly enriches both our academic programs and our outreach to the wider community. All lectures are free and open to the public.
This event is eligible for CLE credit.
A weeknight or daytime permit is now required after 5:00 pm on weekdays. No permit is required from 5:00 pm Friday through 7:30 am Monday. A $1.00 one-night pass is available in selected lots. More information can be found at UNC’s Weeknight Parking website.
Image Credit: Jes Fan, Bivalve, 2023, polymer-modified gypsum, metal, glass, and pigment
