Asia Art Archive
233 Hollywood Road
Sheung Wan
Hong Kong
Asia Art Archive‘sresearch activities shape our collections of published and primary source materials that reflect recent art practices in Asia. Through ongoing conversations with scholars, researchers, and cultural practitioners, we develop collaborative projects and programmes that activate our existing collections, bring in new ones, and catalyse novel initiatives to question and augment existing art historical narratives. Flexible in timeframes and open to diverse outcomes, AAA’s research fellowships and residencies present new possibilities in producing and sharing knowledge.
Recent and ongoing research fellowships and residencies include:
Amelia Jones, the Los Angeles-based art historian, writer, and Vice Dean of Critical Studies at Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California, is a pioneering scholar of performance art and a recent AAA scholar-in-residence. In June 2015, Jones gave a public lecture titled “Intimate Relations: What Makes Performance Queer? What Makes Queer Performative?” based on her forthcoming book. Jones also contributed to a workshop comprised of practitioners from various disciplines—dance, art history, and cultural studies—to share perspectives on performance art and its documentation.
Alec Steadman is a London-based curator and the inaugural Fellow of the Exhibition Studies Research Fellowship, co-organised with Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Steadman’s research project explores the diverse models of self-organisation currently practiced and developed by artists in Asia, with a particular focus on the Southeast Asian archipelago. His residency is ongoing as of July 2015
Zhuang Wubin is an independent writer, curator, photographer, and Special Visiting Lecturer at Faculty of Fine Arts, Chiang Mai University. He employs photography to understand cultures and histories of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. Zhuang surveys the photographic practices of late colonial to contemporary Southeast Asia in his current book in progress. His residency is ongoing as of July 2015.
Olivier Krischer is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) at the Australian National University, Canberra. Supported by a Joint Research Grant initiated by AAA in partnership with the Contemporary at the Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age Initiative (C-MAP) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Krischer’s research points to Japan as a significant site for early presentations of contemporary Chinese art from 1989–93. Beginning his residency in July 2014, he has presented his findings in a public talk at AAA; his materials, including interviews, copies of publications, exhibition documentation, and ephemera, will enter AAA’s digital collection shortly.
Lau Kin Wah is a Hong Kong-based independent researcher who developed the discursive programme “A ‘Self-Taught’ Artist’s Quest for Knowledge” in response to AAA’s ongoing project mapping the personal archive of artist Ha Bik Chuen (1925–2009). The intervention contextualised the materials collected by Ha Bik Chuen to re-examine the meaning of “self-taught” in the discourse surrounding art in Hong Kong. His residency has extended from January–July 2015.
Chinnan (Vinod Velayudhan) is a Baroda-based artist and inaugural fellow of the Archival Fellowship, an AAA collaboration with India Foundation for the Arts. Velayudhan’s ongoing project experiments with new ways—including navigation tools and data visualisation—of presenting Jyoti Bhatt’s digitised archive of Living Traditions.
Shuxia Chen is a PhD candidate at the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) at Australian National University, Canberra, and the grantee of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Curatorial Residency Programme 2014 organised by AAA. Chen is researching Chinese photography groups active in the 1980s and their relationship to the state. Chen’s ongoing project aims to develop an exhibition examining how Chinese photography transformed and departed from Social Realism during China’s reform era.
Asia Art Archive is an independent non-profit organisation initiated in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region. With an international Board of Directors, an Advisory Board made up of noted scholars and curators, and an in-house research team, AAA has collated one of the most valuable collections of material on contemporary art in the region—open to the public free of charge and increasingly accessible from its website. More than a static repository waiting to be discovered, AAA instigates critical thinking and dialogue for a wide range of audiences via public, research, residential and educational programmes.
