“Beyond a beauty cream, Mother is a Woman invites you to rethink kinship through the pores of your skin” – Jes Fan

When the body and binary are taken out what are we left with? Jes Fan thinks of that often when creating his work. Being queer-identifying and a minority in the US, he is no stranger to mixing the topics of gender, identity, and race. Taking biological materials from their context within the body, Fan incorporates science to figure out the essence of their meaning and lends a completely new one for his audience. In Mother is a Woman, the Hong Kong-born andBrooklyn based artist went back to his home country to get his samples for his next piece from his mother.

“There’s nothing weirder than holding your mom’s excretions in your hand…”

Fan’s intent was to make a cream with the estrogen extracted from his post-menopausal mother.  When he gets back to the US he takes the samples to a lab and videographer Asa Westcott document the process and the participants that later try on the cream. The expression on each participant ranges from emotionless to smiling as they rub the cream into their skin.

There’s something strangely intimate about this whole piece. People take hormones for various reasons but there’s never a question of how it’s made or where it comes from. We share a relationship with the ones around us, our family, but we don’t take into account how they shape us and are a part of us. It made me evaluate how I view womanhood and relations that I had with my own mother. We’re close and I have a closeness with her but that’s not the same in everyone else’s case. And for that, I feel thankful.

Sources

Fan, Jes. “Mother is a Woman.” Vimeo, April 8, 2018. https://vimeo.com/263716151.

“Jes Fan.” Empty Gallery. Accessed December 18, 2019. https://emptygallery.com/artists/jes-fan/.

“Jes Fan In Flux.” Art21. Accessed December 18, 2019. https://art21.org/watch/new-york-close-up/jes-fan-in-flux/.