Gloria Fan Duan
Fou Residency period: July–August, 2025
Residency Works
The Glass Garden: Yucatán Peninsula
Hybrid No. 004.0
c. January 2026
Materials resin, steel pins, glass, monofilament, perfume
Medium Sculpture; Video
Dimensions 45 x 35 x 35 inches
Description
This artwork is a unique original, produced from casts of specimens collected in Wassaic, New York (Fall-Winter 2025); Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico (Summer 2025); and Brooklyn, New York (Spring 2023-Spring 2025). The specimens are contained within a glass vessel and held with glass stalks hand blown in Providence, Rhode Island by Alessia Arregui. The specimens can also be arranged and pinned into a birch shadowbox built in Quebec, Canada by Bert Lessard.
Hybrid No. 005.0
c. January 2026
Materials resin, steel pins, glass, monofilament, velvet, foam, wood
Medium Sculpture; Video
Dimensions 24.75 x 24.75 x 2.75 inches; MP4
Description
This artwork is a unique original, produced from casts of specimens collected in Wassaic, New York (Fall–Winter 2025); Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico (Summer 2025); and Brooklyn, New York (Winter 2024–Spring 2025). The specimens are contained within a birch shadow box built in Quebec, Canada by Bert Lessard. The specimens can also be assembled and arranged as a bouquet, held in a hand-blown glass vessel by Alessia Arregui of Providence, Rhode Island.
Hybrid No. 006.0
March 2026
Materials Resin, steel pins, velvet, foam, wood
Dimensions 23.25 x 16.5 x 5 inches
Residency Reflections
From July through August 2025, I was in residency with Fou Gallery in the Yucatán Peninsula. I explored primordial and ancient sites where natural and human histories converge. I swam in Laguna Bacalar, home to stromatolites, living fossils theorized to be Earth’s first oxygenators. Cenote Sac Actun, part of the underground water system shaped by the Chicxulub meteor impact. The excavated city ruins of the ancient Maya. Alongside these encounters, I maintained an extended period of solitude as a method for developing my creative practice.
As the vastness of geological time opened around me, my inner landscape expanded in kind. Natural forces and emotional weather shaped my ecology. Through these experiences, I began to sense where and how I might inhabit these continuities. The Glass Garden evolved from these conditions as a practice of working within ecotones: threshold spaces where different systems meet and transform…
Working Process
Gloria Fan Duan is an artist and educator whose work explores the poetic intersections of art, science, and technology. She obtained a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA in Art and Technology/Sound Practices from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, continues to shape her aesthetic vision through the lens of science and technology. Duan currently teaches at both Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute, where her pedagogy is rooted in the same values that drive her artistic practice: systems thinking, material experimentation, and a critical relationship to emerging technologies. She has exhibited internationally at venues such as Ars Electronica, Currents New Media Festival, Digerati Experimental Media Festival, and Art Basel in Basel. While engaging globally, she still continues to prioritize local and community art spaces. Reviewed in The Washington Post, her first solo show, Mobius Waves, was in her hometown at Hillyer International Arts & Artist in the Washington, D.C. area. Since then, she has cultivated a global community through select collaborative and commissioned projects, including The Bonsai Paradox with the Chicago Botanic Garden, and an international campaign with La Prairie and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, which was featured in Architectural Digest, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. She has also received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Interlace Grant and held fellowships at Pratt Institute and the NARS Foundation.
Drawing from biotechnology experimentation, horticultural arts, and the visual languages of still life and landscape painting, Duan investigates the tension between fragility and permanence through how we control, care for, and see ourselves reflected in the natural world. Her work engages with artistic and scientific attempts to augment, preserve, and reimagine nature. Organic and synthetic materials are often conflated to imitate each other, foregrounding the emotional and existential dimensions of such inquiries.
*Gloria Fan Duan’s residency is generously supported by NATL.
