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Work by Gloria Fan Duan: green leaf inside a clear glass cylinder nested within a larger glass cylinder, lit with soft light patterns on a gray ground.
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International Residency

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Residency Full Fellowship

Gloria Fan Duan

Hybrid No. 001, 2024, Resin, glass, steel pins, 14 x 16 x 14 in. Image description: A translucent pale blue-green sculpture of orchid-like flowers, leaves, and stems rising from a clear glass bowl, casting a soft shadow on white.
Specimen No. 001, 2024, Resin, acrylic box, velvet, foam, steel pins, 2 x 2 x 2 in. Image description: A translucent, pale gray cast of a deeply lobed, feathery leaf pinned inside a small clear box against a black background.
Specimen No. 002, 2024, Resin, acrylic box, velvet, foam, steel pins, 2 x 2 x 2 in. Image description: A pale, glowing cast of a ruffled, rounded leaf with fine veins, set inside a small clear box against a black background.
Specimen No. 010, 2024, Resin, acrylic box, velvet, foam, steel pins, 2 x 2 x 2 in. Image description: A translucent cast of a round, lily-pad-like leaf with radiating veins and a droplet, plus a curling stem, inside a small clear box on black.
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Gloria Fan Duan’s studio and laboratory based practice considers the aesthetic connections between nature and technology. Using various forms of technological augmentation including digital and biotechnology practices, she renders uncanny instances where beauty overrides naturalism. Trajectories that exist as pure speculation, like death or the future, remain elusive due to the inherent limitations of the human experience. By creating a visual vocabulary to depict ideas beyond the scope of human perception, her works speculate on impossible realities and unseen worlds. These simulacrous approximations often fuse the organic and synthetic. Her work serves to understand the subjectivity of how realities emerge.

Gloria Fan Duan is an artist and professor whose work explores the intersections of art, science, and technology through speculative projects that fuse the organic and synthetic. She has exhibited internationally at Art Basel in Basel, Ars Electronica, Currents New Media Festival, and the Wrong Biennale, with projects featured in Architectural Digest, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.Her teaching at The New School, Parsons and Pratt Institute stems from the foundational aspects of her practice, emphasizing systemic design thinking and craftsmanship. Fan Duan's work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation Interlace Grant, as well as residencies and collaborations with the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, La Prairie, Chicago Botanical Gardens, and Pratt Institute. She holds a BFA from RISD and an MFA from SAIC.

Gloria Fan Duan is the NARS Season I, 2025 International Residency Fellow.

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