Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 5

Born 1990 in Scarborough, Canada
Lives in Brookly, NY, and Hong Kong 

For Jes Fan, the body is a site of making. The four sculptures here were created from 3D-printed CAT scans of his own body. The two wall works map a cross section of his knee and hip muscles. The freestanding work Contrapposto is composed of one of his vertebrae, copied six times and draped over a metal structure, turning the skeleton inside-out to become the skin. Glass forms hand-blown by the artist and his team resemble body organs inside.

Gut, contouring the interior of the artist’s stomach, is embedded inside the wall and only visible through three sculpted holes. The color palette and concept of all four sculptures were drawn from the Aquilaria sinensis—a species of incense tree from Hong Kong, where the artist was raised. When infected or wounded, the tree secretes a resin to heal itself.

In these sculptures, injury becomes an allegory of an interior state of being, suggesting something precious might be generated by invisible wounds borne by queer bodies and bodies of color.