The Artists Giving Figurative Sculpture New Life

IT’S A CONFUSING time to have a body. On the one hand, we have more ways to modify flesh than ever before. We regulate hormones and heartbeats, restore lost hearing, replace faulty livers and reconstruct faces. And yet the body feels increasingly vulnerable. Between deepfakes and the distortions of social media, appearances are subject to scrutiny and doubt. Covid-19 revealed how even slight physical differences can be fatal. Subject to changing laws and environmental crises beyond our control, few of us have much authority over our corporeal selves.

Amid this uncertainty, artists are depicting the body with fresh urgency. “The idea of the body as material and not as something necessarily coherent is something that I see artists taking up in really compelling new ways,” said the curator Lanka Tattersall, who organized the recent exhibition “Vital Signs: Artists and the Body” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In their work, she continued, the body reveals itself as “matter that can be molded and looked at, made pliable and shifted.”

“Did you know the word ‘norm’ came from a carpenter’s tool?” asked the Canadian-born artist Jes Fan, 34, who was raised in Hong Kong and lives in New York City. In his studio, an industrial loft in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, supposedly normal bodies were nowhere in sight. We stood surrounded by cascading piles of partial casts of friends’ torsos, an undulating resin form derived from a CT scan of Fan’s pelvis and a metal armature draped in crinkled folds of yuba, the rubbery skin that forms on the surface of heated soy milk.

In Fan’s work, soy has served as a symbolic androgyne. A source of both pharmaceutical estrogen and testosterone, it reappears in various forms — from solid bean to simmering liquid. A literal and metaphorical fluidity pervades the sculptures: They tend to look as though they’re oozing, dripping, melting and merging. “Everything’s transitory, nothing is stagnant,” he said. That philosophy, more and more, is guiding current approaches to the body.