Starting in 2023, one US based applicant per season of the International Residency will be awarded a Full Fellowship, which covers all program fees for the season. A jury consisting of NARS staff and select art professionals review applications on the merit of artistic quality and level of need; studio practice; and the potential professional development and benefit from engaging with the NARS community. Only US based artists are eligible to receive the Full Fellowship.
Click here to learn more about the International Residency Program, and how to apply.
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.
My name is Gloria Fan Duan (she/her). I am an artist based in Brooklyn, working at the intersections of nature, technology, and the abstract. My work explores themes of permanence, fragility, death and the unseen, and what is referred to as the organic and inorganic world. I am interested in reflecting on why we choose to exist, and how these choices affect our realities. 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, I speculate on impossible realities and unseen worlds.
I practice sculpture and animation: my tangible art pieces coincide with digitally rendered moving images that act as mirrors and answers to their counterparts. These simulated approximations often fuse the organic and synthetic. They serve to understand the subjectivity of how realities emerge.
I also use various forms of technological augmentation including digital and biotechnology practices to render instances where beauty overrides naturalism. My interests and use of scientific and technological metaphors centers around how these fields of inquiry pursue advancing our survival. For me, these methods and tools are tangible manifestations for a collective desire for survival and easing existence. I think about how they are often driven by socio-economic forces of capital and politics. By engaging with these tools through metaphor, I speculate on alternative possibilities like how they might be designed for collective care.
Following my mother’s passing in 2013, my practice began to develop these existential questions through a visual language that is absent from traditional figuration. Her death revealed the presence of an ongoing relationship, one that materializes through negative space, memory, scent, objects, time, and ritual. Acts like placing flowers by her grave or planting a tree in her honor became ways to materialize her absence. The botanical world has since become a framework for contextualizing time, growth, and impermanence on a larger scale, allowing me to situate personal loss within a broader, more cyclical understanding of existence.
My current series, The Glass Gardens, is a collection of resin casts molded from the exposed structural components of plants. During my season at the NARS Foundation, I have been using these detailed recreations to create a series of hybrid bouquet sculptures, and still life specimen pinnings, which both imitate and reach beyond nature. I have also begun working on a video work that mirrors another speculative dimension to the work.
I appreciate this question because I’m usually thinking about how materiality and physicality can express these ideas. I have been using plastic resins to create glass-like surfaces and incorporating scent to evoke memory and fantasy. In the way light passes through the facets of each flower, illuminating its form, and the fragrance elicits a reaction without being seen, these choices are aimed at bridging the tangible and the intangible.
The materiality of the work is also tied to my exploration of time, transformation, and the limitations of human perception. By working with resin and decellularized organic matter, I am creating forms that reference natural cycles operating beyond our immediate awareness. These material replicas embody a tension between permanence and impermanence, preservation and decay—suggesting a visual vocabulary that extends beyond human experience.
Through biotech processes like decellularization, organic matter becomes ghostly suspended in an ambiguous state between life and death. In contrast, plastic materials act as a symbolic technology of preservation, transforming organic forms to alter their natural lifespan. When cast into a small leaf picked from the pavement, this contrast highlights a fragile balance between what is fleeting and what endures.
These altered forms evoke different elemental time zones—plant life, fossil remains, and frozen water cycles—all existing on scales beyond human perception. Plants regenerate in cyclical rhythms that far exceed our daily awareness, fossils preserve traces of life across millennia, and frozen water holds a moment in suspension before dissolving back into motion. Each of these processes speaks to time as something fluid and layered, rather than linear.
In my practice, I am interested in how these ideas can be visually embodied, whether through material transformation, artificial processing, or visual symbolism. The research, experimentation, and labor required to create these forms is also my earnest attempt to grasp and make visible the intangible forces that shape our world.
The residency program and fellowship have given me the time and space to reflect on how my work can figure into different arenas of the art world, whether institutional, academic, or commercial. The variety of studio visitors allowed me to refine my understanding of which aspects of my practice resonate in different contexts and how I might position the work moving forward. Each visit also helped me get to the next step of an idea I was grappling with.
Being at NARS also gave me the chance to scale up my work. I began experimenting with larger formats, using the wall space to create expansive specimen pinnings that feel more contemplative.
The residency also helped me develop the language around my practice. Through conversations, critiques, and public engagement, I’ve been practicing how to articulate my ideas—whether in a 1-minute introduction, a 3-minute summary, or a deeper 5- to 10-minute discussion. These skills will continue to serve me as I navigate opportunities beyond residency.
Moving forward, I’ll remember my time at NARS as a transformative moment of expansion—both in the physical scale of my work and in the clarity with which I communicate my practice!
One small but meaningful routine during my time at NARS became reading on my commute to and from the studio. Each train ride became a way to carve out personal time amidst the demands of the day. I started and finished a book during my commuting hours, and was able to transition in and out of studio mode by engaging with ideas outside of my immediate practice. It was a simple ritual, but one that helped punctuate the rhythm of my days and made the residency feel like part of a larger, evolving process.
Hybrid No. 1, Brooklyn was a pretty complex piece for me, both in its form and process. In the studio, I focused on pinning the components together, thinking through balance, weight, and spatial relationships in a way to present different views that felt delicate, harmonious, chaotic and alive.
Conceptually, the piece draws from traditions of Chinese flower arrangement, ikebana, and vanitas flower paintings—each of which is a meditation on life, death, presence, absence, and the passage of time. These traditions explore how compositions embody impermanence, shifting with the seasons or representing fleeting beauty. I was particularly interested in how these arrangements create a sense of controlled nature, framing organic forms within a structured, almost ritualistic practice.
The uncanny quality of Hybrid No. 1, Brooklyn ties into this—perhaps shifting the viewer’s gaze and senses towards a more fantastical or speculative realm. By positioning the piece at eye level, almost like a portrait, I wanted to create an encounter where viewers could look up into it. This is also the first work in The Glass Gardens to incorporate scent, a floral perfume, Aesop’s Aurner. In conversations with Joyous, we discussed how the positioning of the work could inform how people navigate through the gallery space, and how the addition of fragrance could activate another layer of uncanniness. I like how she contextualized it as a piece of science fiction. The work challenges perceptions of what is real and artificial, natural and synthetic, enduring and ephemeral. It invites viewers to reconsider their relationship to botanical life and the materials that preserve and shape our landscapes.
My advice is quite general. It would be to trust your instincts, take your time, and approach relationship-building with care and patience. This residency is not just about production, it’s also about reflection, experimentation, and connection. Be open to new ideas, but also respect your own practice by having confidence in your vision. Not every conversation or critique may resonate, but each one can refine your goals and direction more clearly. Stay grounded in what feels meaningful to you, and let the experience unfold at its own pace.
