Extracted Bodies: Patty Chang and Jes Fan in Conversation

On the occasion of Patty Chang’s solo exhibition Milk Debt, on view at Pioneer Works until May 23, please join us for a conversation between Chang and former Pioneer Works Visual Arts Resident Jes Fan. Moderated by Pioneer Works Curator-at-Large David Everitt Howe, the two will discuss their work in the context of gendered experience, race, and the body-as-resource.

About the Artists

Patty Chang is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation, and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects, and impacted subjectivities. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; BAK, Basis voor actuele Kunst, Utrecht; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Times Museum in Guangzhou, China; and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She has received a United States Artist Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a Creative Capital Fellowship, short listed for the Hugo Boss Prize, a Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant. She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Jes Fan lives and works in Hong Kong and Brooklyn, USA. Fan originally trained in glass making, but has expanded his practice to encompass diverse mediums. His trans-disciplinary practice speculates on the intersection of biology and identity in relation to the materiality of the gendered and racialised body. Fan is the recipient of various fellowships and residencies, including the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2017), Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019-2020), as well as the NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellowship (2020). Recent exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial (2021), Sydney Biennale (2020), Rockbund Art Museum, China (2019); Hayward Gallery, UK (2019); Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2018); and Museum of Arts and Design, USA (2017).

About the Moderator

David Everitt Howe is a Brooklyn-based critic and curator. His writing regularly appears in Artforum, Art in America, BOMB—where he’s a contributing editor—Broadcast, frieze, and Mousse. He’s currently Curator-at-Large at Pioneer Works and an editor of its new, online publishing platform, Broadcast. From 2015-2020 he was Curator at the non-profit, organizing solo shows by Gerard & Kelly: CLOCKWORK (2018), Nan Goldin: Kathleen (2018), Jimmy DeSana: Remainders (2016), and with Gabriel Florenz co-curated Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson): White Man on a Pedestal (2017), among other projects. Previously, Howe was Online Art Editor at BOMB; Associate Director for Dirty Looks; and Curatorial/Development Associate at Participant Inc.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. The project was also supported, in part, by 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, University Artists Scheme – The University of Hong Kong, Art Matters Grant, Anonymous Was A Woman Grant, and the United States Artists Fellowship.