[JES FAN] Once you've seen them,
they're lodged in your mind.
Especially thinking of them as one of the first few representations
of the Chinese person as a subject.
There's a medical missionary called Peter Parker
who traveled to Canton to perform the surgical incision of tumors
in the early nineteenth century.
Lam Qua was a really celebrated painter at the time.
He was most famous for painting portraitures.
But I suppose that Lam Qua was also celebrated
by how accurate he can paint his sitters.
He's known for this one quote saying,
"What eye no see, no can do."
There's something about Chinese-ness here.
Thinking, like, how did Chinese-ness become a word?
What are the technologies that's involved in creating this idea of "the other"?
Why does the shoulder need to be bare?
Like, the braid of hair is placed.
It's just so seductive, and I was wondering if that kind of seduction
has to come in a way that you're able to see
the sitter as a fellow human.
["Jes Fan: Infectious Beauty"]
I think it made me really try to understand the idea of beauty and seduction.
I think my work has a lot to do with seduction.
Nowadays, beauty is really flat.
There's only one emotion you can emote on social media,
which is the double tap, right? [LAUGHS]
That there's only a heart shape.
When something is beautiful, it's just a flat heart.
But then, when you think of beauty in the past,
it's beauty and the sublime.
It has to come with this suspension--
this fear.
It also meant, in the past,
to describe something that was so beautiful
that it almost makes you want to puke.
[LAUGHS]
Originally, I grew up in Hong Kong.
It's very oppressive, being queer there,
just not being able to see yourself reflected in society,
nor even within just
being able to see happy, queer adults--
or queer adults in general.
It's kind of not being able to see a future extension of yourself.
I had a really rough few years growing up,
trying to find who I can be.
[AUDIO FROM NEWS BROADCAST] Breaking news from Hong Kong,
where the government invoked emergency powers overnight,
this concludes a ban on masks during public demonstrations.
Face masks have become a precious commodity during the pandemic.
That was the case in Hong Kong a few months ago,
but supplies have bounced back.
[JES FAN] I've been thinking a lot about,
since Hong Kong's
protests are cauterized by the virus,
the changing of different masks,
from the cartridges to the bacterial;
but they signify such different social movement.
There's something about that covering
and needing to achieve more and more so,
that's the next step of evolution,
becoming more and more autonomous
and not being able to shed your microsphere to others.
I was thinking about the prosthetic face mask,
to completely seal you off
and you can be the perfect individual.
You're like your own atmosphere.
[JULIE WOLF] So my understanding of the piece
is that you make it so that it's a glass shape of something.
And then, you add the melanin to the piece,
and then fill it with silicon afterwards, correct?
[FAN] Yeah.
[WOLF] What we want to make is melanin.
It's the final physical form that we're going to make.
This is called L-DOPA.
In this case, L-DOPA is a really unstable molecule.
If you expose it to light
or ambient temperature,
it will start to do something called autopolymerizing.
It's going to start to make a polymer,
which is a repeated subunit,
which is going to be related to that melanin.
So what we're going to do is to make the conditions
as unstable for L-DOPA as possible,
so that we can bypass the biological process
and just get right to the melanin.
So it's not as dark,
but you can see that there's the flakes in there.
[FAN] So crazy that they're warm.
[WOLF] Yeah.
[FAN] It would be great to have them...
something that you can identify or trigger,
and sort of hope that is that.
Because the plates you gave me
with the E. coli,
they look exactly like molds.
So let's hope that these will grow happily
and into more slurry-like, you know?
A lot what I'm trying to do with
what we consider as gendered materials,
or racialized materials,
they're just really, really absurd.
It's like a cooking show.
I have semen,
blood,
melanin,
and pee.
[LAUGHS]
So at the time I was thinking a lot about how race,
especially in the U.S.,
is seen as infectious.
Think about China and coronavirus.
Think about SARS and being in Hong Kong.
And think about Jim Crow era, not sharing bodies of water.
That idea of it being infected.
These days in Asia, the beauty is smooth,
has no corners, does not repulse.
There's something about...
doing this is subverting that balance,
it's showing the labor to acquire that smoothness.
And by showing it, it looks like these infectious rings.
But then, also the materials that's carried in these bulbous forms
are actually semen that's decaying.
I find that very funny.
[LAUGHS]
It's very much about having forms fitting into each other
and somehow evoking a sense of this uncanniness,
but simultaneously so erotic that you can't stop.
But to be attracted to it,
that eroticness
seduces you.
It's beauty in the gloss,
and the possibility to see your own reflection in it.
At the same time,
you're actually staring at something that repulses you,
that actually is considered infectious
or unclean.
My therapist says that I'm so familiar with oppression
that danger and risk and oppression makes me feel at home.
So I slave myself away in the studio.
Or, like, I deprive myself of pleasure
because I'm not oppressed as a queer being here.
[LAUGHS]
So I oppress myself now. [LAUGHS]
Because I can't go back if I fail.