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Conan is a historian of art and material culture of the Theravāda Buddhist monastery (Lao: vat), with a regional focus on Lao PDR and Thailand.

He is broadly interested in how material things found in Buddhist temple contexts which may be described as "sacred" or "holy" (Lao: sing saksit) — bone relics, Buddha images, wall paintings, photographs, portraits of monks, ritual offerings, and so on — work in concert within the architectural and ritual environments of their activation to mediate relationships between human (monastic, lay) and non-human (divine, otherworldly) agents.

A semester abroad in his undergraduate years with the Antioch Buddhist Studies Program in Bodh Gaya — a major pilgrimage site in India marking the place of the Buddha's enlightenment — was the beginning of his engagement with Buddhist practices of memorialisation and discourses of heritage formation.

Conan then worked at the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore as (ultimately) Curator for the museum's Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist collections, where he organised several temporary exhibitions, including Cities and Kings: Ancient Treasures from Myanmar (2017) and Living with Ink: The Collection of Dr Tan Tsze Chor (2019). Most recently, Body & Spirit: The Human Body in Thought and Practice (2022-3), co-curated with Noora Zulkifli, was an interfaith exhibition attentive to the museum's responsibility as a custodian of sacred things, attempting to engage more meaningfully with local religious communities through objects in the collection as part of a broader experimentation in the Museum with more inclusive and restitutive ways of exhibiting Southeast Asian art.

In 2018, Conan received an MA in History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS University of London, funded by the Alphawood Foundation. His dissertation examined the relationship between the "original" model and its replicas in how wonderworking Buddha images like the Phra Sihing have been perceived in Thailand, developing on Walter Benjamin's insights on the reciprocal gaze in the "aura" of art objects.

In the wake of this research, together with his work on sacred objects and their communities at ACM, Conan developed his current doctoral project at SOAS on modes of self-representation, portraiture, and performative embodiments of subjectivity in the collections of the Buddhist Archive of Luang Prabang in Lao PDR, which preserves over 35,000 photographs and photographic documents collected by Buddhist monks from 19 local monasteries, mostly dating to the 20th century. His PhD research is supported by Nanyang Technological University Singapore (HIPS).

Conan is currently also curatorial advisor for the upcoming Museum of Buddhist Art in Vat Saen Sukharam, Luang Prabang, a community museum which was the vision of the Most Venerable Sathu Nyai Khamchan Virachitta Mahathela (1920-2007), co-founder of the Buddhist Archive and one of the most prominent personalities of mid-20th-century Luang Prabang.He is a member of Circumambulating Objects: on Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art (CO-OP), a collaborative research project funded by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories Scheme.