NEW HAVEN, CONN.- The Yale University Art Gallery will present Jes Fan: Unbounded, on view from February 27 through June 28, 2026. Organized by Margaret Ewing, the Gallery’s Horace W. Goldsmith Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition is the first solo museum presentation for one of today’s leading young artists.

Jes Fan (born Toronto 1990; raised in Hong Kong; lives and works in New York) makes works that explore the porousness of identity and challenge the limits of binary categorization. Jes Fan: Unbounded features sculptures that highlight the artist’s wide-ranging processes, from glassblowing to CT scanning and 3D printing, and their innovative approach to materials, including resin, glass, and silicone. Using an abstract language often based on the human form, Fan’s sculptures probe the changing nature of both embodiment and identity, sometimes incorporating biological traces of the body itself, such as melanin, estrogen, and testosterone. Since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design program in glass in 2014, Fan has gained widespread recognition and been included in numerous international group exhibitions, including Scientia Sexualis, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024); the Whitney Biennial (2024), in New York; the M+ Sigg Prize Finalist Exhibition, in Hong Kong (2023); the Venice Biennale (2022); the New Museum Triennial (2021), in New York; and the Sydney Biennial (2020).

The exhibition includes sculptures representative of the major subjects in Fan’s work over the last decade as well as two short videos. Early works employ biological substances to examine the mutability of the human body. In Form Begets Function (2020), for example, Fan injects testosterone, melanin, and urine into glass elements to separate these substances from the gendered and racialized associations they usually carry. Another series of sculptures, the Networks (2021), displays hair-like mold spore cultures encased in intricate networks of scientific glass tubes; the works point to the ways in which fears of contamination and beliefs surrounding public health and hygiene have intersected with racial discrimination throughout history, at the same time challenging the hierarchical relationship between humans and other species through the careful cultivation of this organism. Since 2023, Fan has expanded their scope to consider other living beings. Recent projects feature species of oysters and the agarwood tree that are native to Hong Kong. Both organisms have evolved regenerative survival strategies that transform injuries from outside threats, producing pearls in the former and scented resin used for incense in the latter. Fan links these subjects to the process of working through the legacy of colonial rule.

Hong Kong is an important reference point for much of Fan’s art. The city’s natural and built environments, including the banyan trees and plumbing pipes that line the outsides of many structures there, have inspired the formal language in many of Fan’s sculptures. Fan’s point of view has also been shaped by their experiences growing up in Hong Kong both before and after Great Britain handed the city over to the People’s Republic of China in 1997—a time of anxiety and transition. In this geographical and metaphorical crossroads, lines blur and categories blend: East and West, ancient and modern, colonial and postcolonial. Fan’s artwork proposes a new way of considering the world, one in which systems of categorization are broken open, allowing us to see that things are more complex, disordered, and variable than we may have once believed.