Xiner Lan (b. 2000) is a multi-media artist and performer who constructs worlds where different modes of realities converge – the magic with the mundane, the imagined with the perceived. Working with fiction, translation, autotheory, and poetry, Xiner tells stories based on the “script” – a drafted, executable sequence with theatrical potential. Rehearsing and enacting the script, the artist crafts narratives within video, game, performance, installation, and their combination. Their work has been exhibited in Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Ivy Film Festival, M P Birla Millenium Gallery, etc. Xiner earned a Bachelor’s degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently pursuing an MFA in Design Media Arts at UCLA.
Artist Statement
If there is another reality parallel to this one—this language, this contemporary moment—this reality would be an opaque container of all meanings of all people; this reality is a portable home. How do we see it? How can we get there, if possible?
I write scripts. A script can be a play script, a sequence of computation codes, musical scores, or a manuscript. I refer to all of them—a drafted, executable text with theatrical potential, a piece of the past that has the power to cast a spell on the future. Enacting these scripts, I create videos with a lens, games with rules, performances with my body, and combinations. As a media artist, I build worlds where different modes of realities converge—the magical with the mundane, the fictional with the lived, the fabricated with the observational. Yet, I question these worlds and make my entrance with humor.
I talk about the hyper-specifics of human systems of function—I talk about sports, the extreme players in resorts, and patrollers in loops. I create and re-examine creation myths, science fiction, and display technologies from paper and ink to projectors and monitors. I make gesamtkunstwerk, or total works of art; still, I want to host a cozy space, with no screens or cables needed, to code and interact with our voices, to sing and read with people.
To capture something that exists elsewhere, from the source of this creative procedure—the text—, our language is never enough: storytelling reduces; translation reframes the context; my vocabulary is censored. I was born and raised in Beijing, a city where nature is molded into grids and landscapes, and I speak a language that is continuously simplified. How can I write with holes in my language? How do we resist our way into a future that is advanced by forgetting? I create poetics—as Sylvia Wynter proposes, as the technologies of reinventing an alternative reality. In this contemporary era, when cultures converge, where race is employed as the technology of encoding and processing differences, I constantly feel the urge to create contexts.
If I could be taken back to where I belong, where everyone is accepted and understood, I would stay in my room and dream. But since there isn’t one, and we all lack one, I make art.