“Mother is a Woman” is an idiomatic banter in colloquial Cantonese: a statement so commonsensical and self-evident that even a child could understand it. Yet beyond the simplistic tautology between femininity and motherhood, the grammatical construction of the statement also engenders deeper questions around agency. The word “mother” is considered highly “alive” in the animacy hierarchy of modern linguistics, a semantic principle that ranks nouns according to their "sentience" and ability to initiate emotional responses.

Thus, it seemed fitting that ”Mother is a Woman” was the title of a solo exhibition at Empty Gallery by the Cantonese-speaking Jes Fan, a sculptor who challenges our ability to forge kinship with different sorts of beings, be they inanimate, mineral, queer, non-binary, or none of the above. Fan is particularly drawn to the animacy theory, proposed by queer studies academic Mel Y. Chen, that questions the humanly imposed division between living and dead, animate and inanimate matters, and how this contrast intersects with sexuality, race, and our environs.

In the show, Fan immersed viewers into an Ovidean world of multispecies metamorphoses, accessible by descending a staircase into the exhibition space. The artist had transformed the gallery’s black box by lining the floor generously with dusty-pink faux fur and painting the walls in a neutral greige tone. Visitors’ relationships with the floor was marked by the footprints left when walking around the space. This augmented the feeling that one was being gently pushed to form a relationship with the inanimate objects in the space—which in the absence of natural light, evoked a chthonic world, replete with its host of ahistorical mythical creatures, objects and scenery. In rebellion of the tabula rasa of the white cube or the inert anonymity of the black box, Fan opted for an encompassing and corporeal setting that affects viewers and is reciprocally affected by them.

Across from the staircase and occupying the length of the sidewall was a two-tiered horizontal sculpture, titled Diagram I (2018). The sculpture features fiberglass-coated aluminum rods, which support two slabs that Fan had crafted by applying layers upon layers of epoxy resin, and sanding the surfaces to reveal undulating patterns of colorful strata, like those in sedimentary rocks.  From this structure, tubular glass and resin tendrils and blobs curl, loop and dangle sluggishly like polyps in a coral reef. Though created from lifeless polymer and metals like epoxy resin and aluminum, the work was transformed, through Fan’s hands, into a metaphor for ecological engagement and multispecies kinship.

The waist-height Diagram I also resembles a beauty counter table. Projected on the wall above it was a video documenting the process by which the artist infused estrogen, extracted from their mother’s urine samples, into a beauty cream, titled “Mother is a Woman.” A voiceover in the video beckons: “Mother is a woman. Who are you to her? Who are you to me? Kin is where the mother is.” The estro-mom cream was offered to feminize attendees of the exhibition opening, an experiment that tested the receptivity of the viewer toward human kinship. This was also reflected in the faux fur flooring, which resembles a thick layer of hair that blocks the surface of skin, essentially barring anything—estrogen, water, oil—from being absorbed into the body. In this way, the artist recognizes the limitations of the current heterohormonal biohacking technologies, and suggests that intersectional animacy beyond the molecular level of the beauty cream will require more radical effort. 

Throughout the exhibition, there was a distinct sense that Fan was attempting to establish non-hierarchical, non-anthropocentric and decentering viewpoints that invited viewers to stand or crouch closer to the work. An example of this was Forniphilia I & II (2018)—the term for the desire to become an object. The work, a sculpture placed on a wall pedestal slightly lower than eye level and lined with artificial fur, is comprised of aqua resin fragments molded from the pierced nipple, chests and shoulders of Law Siufung, a genderqueer bodybuilder from Hong Kong. Another two-tiered resin sculpture, Diagram II, contains laxly supported aqua resin slabs that droop and relax on the floor, beneath a resin cast of a yam, which was hung overhead on a chain. To fully experience all these pieces, one had to bend, kneel, stare, crane and gaze—effectively relinquishing the bipedal uprightness of humans, and instead coming down or up to the level of these terran critters and chthonic beings. The placement of objects in the space provided a deeper system of coexistence and animating principle around the visibility of non-binary beings in contemporary society. In “Mother is a Woman,” Fan has created a safe space for these marginalized or unseen beings to bond, or to simply be alive.

Jes Fan’s “Mother is a Woman” is on view at Empty Gallery, until June 2, 2018. 

• Hong Kong