Infectious Beauty

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What is beauty in the age of the double tap? In a visual era dominated by the shiny, happy aesthetic of social media, artist Jes Fan walks the fine line between the beautiful and the grotesque, creating sculptures which simultaneously attract and repulse with their glossy finishes, near-erotic shapes, and use of contested biological materials like testosterone and melanin. Fascinated by the mechanisms that construct our cultural conceptions of race and gender, Fan’s work subtly challenges viewers to examine some of their most deeply held assumptions. “When you think of beauty in the past, it’s beauty and the sublime,” says Fan. “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.”

Filmed at work in their Smack Mellon studio, Socrates Sculpture Park, and a biology lab, Fan also visits Yale University Medical Library for an arresting look at the work of nineteenth century painter Lam Qua. The painter’s famed portraits of everyday Chinese subjects with medical “deformities” provide crucial inspiration and historical precedent for Fan.

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