Jo Fish Confronts the Tension Between Flesh and Data in a World of Visual Saturation

November 15, 2025Uncategorized

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1599128" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/Jo-Fish_6-1.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="Two paintings hang side by side on a white wall—a small grayscale work of a silhouetted figure on the left and a larger painting of two faceless figures embracing in red and gray tones, with geometric framing and bands of color." width="970" height="647" data-caption='Jo Fish’s “The Speed of a Trend” is at HdM Gallery in Beijing through November 22, 2025. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy of Hdm Gallery</span>’>Two paintings hang side by side on a white wall—a small grayscale work of a silhouetted figure on the left and a larger painting of two faceless figures embracing in red and gray tones, with geometric framing and bands of color.

New York-based artist Jo Fish navigates a fluid space between figuration and abstraction with poignancy, evoking the same ambiguity that increasingly defines how we experience and perceive the contemporary world. As everything becomes digitalized—transformed into data and information that often matter more than the physical phenomena they represent—the tension between physical and digital, hand and machine, flesh and virtual finds tangible form in Fish’s work. Her paintings become resonant documents of our time.

Her latest show, “The Speed of a Trend,” which recently opened at HdM Gallery in Beijing and closes November 22, presents ten of her most recent works. Showing them in Beijing makes their meaning even more resonant. China’s accelerated modernization has fully integrated technology into everyday life, making it an apt backdrop for Fish’s exploration of what it means to be human amid the total digitization of experience.

Freely mixing painting, collage and drawing, Fish has developed a hybrid visual language that remains anchored in questions about painting as a medium capable of translating reality and through which the very sense of reality becomes the challenge itself. At the core of her practice lies an inquiry not only into the possibility of representation but into what remains of the human body after centuries of art, science and technology have reshaped how we see and conceive it. As Vilém Flusser once suggested, images in the technical age are no longer windows to the world but programs that reconfigure our perception of it. This notion finds a quiet echo in Fish’s painterly experiments.

A woman with long curly hair sits on a stool in a bright artist’s studio surrounded by large figurative paintings that depict dancers and abstracted human forms. A blue paint-splattered cart filled with brushes and supplies stands beside her, and sketches and canvases cover the white walls and floor around her, showing an active creative workspace.A woman with long curly hair sits on a stool in a bright artist’s studio surrounded by large figurative paintings that depict dancers and abstracted human forms. A blue paint-splattered cart filled with brushes and supplies stands beside her, and sketches and canvases cover the white walls and floor around her, showing an active creative workspace.

Eventually, her work visualizes the passage of time and the evolution of artistic thought from the Renaissance to the present, fusing traditional technique with digital tools to confront the relentless circulation of images in modern society and what remains of their meaning in relation to our worldview.

“A lot of my technique—how I land on things—is very painting-focused. So in many ways, I’m painting about painting, exploring the technique itself,” Fish told Observer before the exhibition’s opening while she was still working on this new series.

It’s particularly intriguing that Fish approaches painting, figuration and the human body through the physical awareness shaped by her background as a gymnast. On her conceptually and technically layered canvases, the body is disassembled, contorted, patched together and stretched into impossible gestures. Some works resemble studies in anatomy but push beyond the limits of human form, presenting anatomies of something more than human.

Her figures are stripped to their essentials, reduced to stylized frameworks that resist individualization. For Fish, this is the most interesting way to think about painting in a world where mastery is no longer defined by hyperrealism. “There are endless ways to make a beautiful painting—you can layer, splash, pour—but I’m more interested in interrogating the medium itself: the paint, its materiality, its history and its future,” she said.

Resonating with Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and Rosi Braidotti’s writing on the posthuman subject, Fish’s painted bodies become more like an interface between organic life and technological extension. As if her figures were flickering onto a screen, she isn’t afraid to leave blank space. “I’m actually more scared of overworking a piece,” she admitted. The black void becomes a site of possibility, suggesting the unseen movements a figure might make.

A large painting of a female figure in black and pink tones stands out on a white wall, with a patterned grayscale border of repeated silhouettes on one side and a yellow line cutting across the composition.A large painting of a female figure in black and pink tones stands out on a white wall, with a patterned grayscale border of repeated silhouettes on one side and a yellow line cutting across the composition.

Equally fascinating is her process. Fish uses A.I. as a collaborator in generating imagery. “I’ve been having these philosophical conversations with it—asking A.I. about the history of painting and how it sees the future,” she said. “It actually gives me very specific answers, which it then codes.”

Fish’s paintings can thus be read as visual aggregations of these exchanges. The printed patterns embedded in her compositions are literal codes, translations of A.I.’s vision for the future of painting. “I integrate those codes into my work. Each one comes from a different conversation. I’m actually coding the painting itself,” she noted.

Her approach operates as a post-structuralist reflection on figuration and, more broadly, on the structure of reality: how we perceive, translate and communicate it through images and symbols. At the same time, Fish carries these questions into the technological age, testing the interplay of hand and machine, analog and digital, as a viable way for painting to exist meaningfully in a data-driven world.

This desire to question physicality and the materiality of the body, and the many surrogates humans have created to grapple with this dilemma, is reflected in the mannequins that populate her studio and sometimes appear in her paintings. “I wanted to contrast the way I draw figures with something very standardized, like a mannequin,” she explained. “Placing them side by side lets me explore a kind of norm versus a real mark. I like that contrast: the perfect profile, the perfect nose, with everything idealized versus the imperfection of drawing.”

She also works with 3D-modeling software that allows her to pose generic digital figures. “I became curious about their origin,” she added. “When you look at those 3D figures, they’re really not so different from mannequins. That connection fascinated me.”

A white-walled gallery room displays three paintings: a still life with flowers on the left, an abstract scene with a window and plant in the center, and a geometric work with mirrored black arrows on the right, all evenly spaced along the walls.A white-walled gallery room displays three paintings: a still life with flowers on the left, an abstract scene with a window and plant in the center, and a geometric work with mirrored black arrows on the right, all evenly spaced along the walls.

In this sense, Fish’s practice emerges from a relentless investigation into the framework of not only representation but also the simulation of human presence in a fully digitalized world. Her works inhabit the space where the image ceases to represent and begins to simulate, recalling Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum, a reality that no longer needs the real. “I’m passionate about art history, but I also want to think about how painting can evolve,” she said. “Of course, I still want the work to be beautiful, but I’m also thinking about the resilience of painting—what it means to keep it alive in the age of data.” Emotional and sensorial layers complicate the apparent flatness of the canvas, revealing a tactile presence that can only be fully perceived in person.

“I wanted to find a way to create texture without actually painting it,” she said. “That ties into everything I’ve been thinking about: the mechanical, the procedural.” Her paintings are consequently hyper-physical. The way she manipulates color and surface makes them vibrate with a sensory tension, despite their minimal, digital aesthetic. The texture itself embodies time, labor and sensation, stretching and folding across layers of pigment in what Henri Bergson described as duration, an elastic continuum of perception and memory.

In her continuously ambivalent and fluid engagement with technology—handing over control even as she reasserts painterly agency—Fish extends the Duchampian and Warholian challenge to authorship and the rejection of the artist’s hand. “Warhol’s disruption wasn’t just conceptual—it was about the process itself, about making the act of painting mechanical,” she reflects.

Here, Fish’s work becomes a critical experiment in what painting and imagery can still be in the age of algorithmically driven sense of reality, an effort to articulate a new phenomenology of the liminal space between digital and real. In this, she gestures toward what Gilbert Simondon termed the technical individuation of the image, where perception, data and matter converge into new hybrid beings. Her works do not merely depict the posthuman, data-saturated condition, they enact it. Through their coded textures and sensorial charge, they invite a rethinking of perception itself that acknowledges, as Byung-Chul Han warns, the exhaustion of experience in the digital age and yet resists it through embodied seeing.

A large painting depicting outlined human figures with partial color fills, one in red shorts and another in a white top, hangs on a white gallery wall beside an open doorway leading into another room.A large painting depicting outlined human figures with partial color fills, one in red shorts and another in a white top, hangs on a white gallery wall beside an open doorway leading into another room.

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