Jacqueline Lan

In no particular order, jac is a lover, a semiotician, a poet, a restaurant goer, a tourist, and a filmmaker.

Her practice draws on autotheory and autoethnography, treating her own epistemic ambition as a form of homesickness that flattens the gap between the beach she was at last summer and the mountains captured by a stranger’s iPhone 13, between a baroque palace and the one printed on a scaffold banner. She applies sustained attention to generic and transient spaces that are, in their publicness, also intimate, extending her truncated repertoire toward objects that are abandoned and banal, until they all become weighted and singular.

Her work usually begins with an impression of an image, indifferent to whether it was lived or received, proceeds by resonance and finds its form from the inside out. Across video, installation, object, text, 3D render, sound, each iteration registers a small failure of mimicry yet creates a new aura. She simulates the texture of her forgetfulness cast on the debris of contemporary malaise, where longing and affectation become interchangeable, where everything feels almost equally distant and close.

Every situation is approached twice simultaneously: through a painterly logic of perception that reenacts the world as it arrives to a body in the act of looking, and through the affective labour spent approximating cultural intimacy. It’s a kind of contemporary impressionism crystallized in second hand cultural experience, using the most honest medium available for a given feeling, whether that is a screenshot, a 3D rendered dappled light source, or a Byredo candle.

She is based in waiting rooms, where she sighs along with objects that aspire to resemble something else.