Lauren Chang

How does conservation differ from repair? How is it similar? How have the tenets and ideas of best practice with conservation changed over time? On today’s episode, I’m talking to Lauren Chang, a textile specialist, who spins, dyes, weaves, and writes about textiles on her website interstitial-spaces.com. She holds a B.A. in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University and an MA in Textile Conservation from the Textile Conservation Centre in the United Kingdom. Lauren worked as a textile conservator at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. We discuss: - How attitudes to repair differ between Chinese and American cultures. - How the tenets and ideas of best practice with conservation have changed over time. - The power dynamics at play in conservation between the people orchestrating the conservation and the people deciding what gets conserved and what doesn’t. - How we can start to repair some of those power imbalances within museums and within conservation. - The importance of ‘sitting in the discomfort of not knowing’, of holding two conflicting ideas at the same time, of nuance. … and more! As recommended by Metro, The Week, Wallpaper and FastCompany.