“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.