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

‘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