Lan collects text in underappreciated places and ferments it until it is too suspicious to ignore. Their text-based pieces borrow the institutional pen of templates and forms, while displacing their functions through skeptical lived experiences. 


Lan chose to highlight a sleeve band from the Textile Museum’s collection, thought to be cut off from the original garment to be more marketable as a flat decorative item. According to the sleeve’s archival file, it was donated by Fred Braida, the developer who gave five floors of his new condo building to the museum that housed it. By merging fact with speculative fiction, they used research on the second-hand Chinese clothing market from looted palaces and the past projects of the Textile Museum to craft a life’s narrative imagined from the perspective of the sleeve band. The video’s critical fabulation recognizes the limits of its own structure to sustain a necessary uncertainty. The intimacy of this doubt gives them the space to interrogate the multiple losses that make up diasporic memory.