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[JES FAN]
Once you've seen them,

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they're lodged in your mind.

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Especially thinking of them as
one of the first few representations

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of the Chinese person as a subject.

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There's a medical missionary
called Peter Parker

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who traveled to Canton to perform
the surgical incision of tumors

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in the early nineteenth century.

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Lam Qua was a really celebrated painter 
at the time.

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He was most famous for painting portraitures.

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But I suppose that Lam Qua was also celebrated

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by how accurate he can paint his sitters.

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He's known for this one quote saying,

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"What eye no see, no can do."

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There's something about Chinese-ness here.

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Thinking, like,
how did Chinese-ness become a word?

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What are the technologies that's involved
in creating this idea of "the other"?

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Why does the shoulder need to be bare?

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Like, the braid of hair is placed.

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It's just so seductive,
and I was wondering if that kind of seduction

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has to come in a way that you're able to see

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the sitter as a fellow human.

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["Jes Fan: Infectious Beauty"]

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I think it made me really try to understand
the idea of beauty and seduction.

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I think my work has a lot to do with seduction.

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Nowadays, beauty is really flat.

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There's only one emotion you can emote on
social media,

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which is the double tap, right?
[LAUGHS]

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That there's only a heart shape.

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When something is beautiful,
it's just a flat heart.

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But then, when you think of
beauty in the past,

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it's beauty and the sublime.

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It has to come with this suspension--

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this fear.

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It also meant, in the past,

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to describe something that was so beautiful

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that it almost makes you want to puke.

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[LAUGHS]

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Originally, I grew up in Hong Kong.

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It's very oppressive, being queer there,

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just not being able to see yourself reflected
in society,

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nor even within just

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being able to see happy, queer adults--

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or queer adults in general.

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It's kind of not being able to see a future
extension of yourself.

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I had a really rough few years growing up,

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trying to find who I can be.

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[JULIE WOLF]
So my understanding of the piece

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is that you make it so that it's a glass shape
of something.

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And then, you add the melanin to the piece,

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and then fill it with silicon afterwards,
correct?

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[FAN]
Yeah.

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[WOLF]
What we want to make is melanin.

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It's the final physical form that we're going
to make.

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This is called L-DOPA.

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In this case, L-DOPA is a really
unstable molecule.

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If you expose it to light

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or ambient temperature,

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it will start to do something called autopolymerizing.

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It's going to start to make a polymer,

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which is a repeated subunit,

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which is going to be related to that melanin.

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So what we're going to do is to make the conditions

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as unstable for L-DOPA as possible,

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so that we can bypass the biological process

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and just get right to the melanin.

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So it's not as dark,

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but you can see that
there's the flakes in there.

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[FAN]
So crazy that they're warm.

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[WOLF]
Yeah.

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[FAN]
It would be great to have them...

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something that you can identify or trigger,

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and sort of hope that is that.

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Because the plates you gave me

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with the E. coli,

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they look exactly like molds.

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So let's hope that these will grow happily

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and into more slurry-like, you know?

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A lot of what I'm trying to do with

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what we consider as gendered materials,

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or racialized materials,

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they're just really, really absurd.

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It's like a cooking show.

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I have semen,

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blood,

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melanin,

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and pee.

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[LAUGHS]

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So at the time I was thinking a lot about
how race,

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especially in the U.S.,

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is seen as infectious.

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Think about China and coronavirus.

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Think about SARS and being in Hong Kong.

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And think about Jim Crow era,
not sharing bodies of water.

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That idea of it being infected.

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These days in Asia, the beauty is smooth,

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has no corners,
does not repulse.

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There's something about...

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doing this is subverting that balance,

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it's showing the labor to acquire that smoothness.

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And by showing it,
it looks like these infectious rings.

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But then, also the materials
that's carried in these bulbous forms

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are actually semen that's decaying.

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I find that very funny.

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[LAUGHS]

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It's very much about
having forms fitting into each other

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and somehow evoking a sense of this uncanniness,

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but simultaneously so erotic
that you can't stop.

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But to be attracted to it,

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that eroticness

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seduces you.

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It's beauty in the gloss,

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and the possibility to see your own reflection
in it.

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At the same time,

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you're actually staring at something that
repulses you,

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that actually is considered infectious

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or unclean.

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My therapist says that I'm so familiar with
oppression

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that danger and risk and oppression makes
me feel at home.

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So I slave myself away in the studio.

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Or, like, I deprive myself of pleasure

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because I'm not oppressed
as a queer being here.

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[LAUGHS]

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So I oppress myself now.
[LAUGHS]

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Because I can't go back if I fail.