Asia Art Archive’s new website, Collection Online, and e-journal
Field Notes
Asia Art Archive
11/F, Hollywood Centre
233 Hollywood Road
Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
T +852 2815 1112
info [at] aaa.org.hk
Initial launch makes more than 3000 items—including images, video documentation, and primary source material—available worldwide for the first time, with new material continuously uploaded.
Asia Art Archive has launched its new website featuring the Collection Online, a continuously growing digital archive of primary source material culled by individual practitioners and researchers in cities across Asia. Making thousands of previously unavailable images, correspondences, ephemera, and documentation of talks and interviews available to the public for the first time, this worldwide platform for research has the capacity to enrich and challenge the way art history is written and shared. Toward its belief in preservation through sharing, AAA is focused on increasing digital access to the information in its collection and connectivity with other knowledge networks and platforms.
AAA’s collection currently contains over 34,000 records comprised of hundreds of thousands of physical and digital items, including books and catalogues, audiovisual material, rare periodicals, primary source material, and the Special Collections (digitised personal collections and focused research projects that enrich the recent histories of the region with divergent micro-narratives). Approximately 300,000 digitised items will eventually be made available through the Collection Online, which launched with an initial 3000 items in June. The Collection Online is a natural extension of AAA’s archival activities and key to its vision of accessibility for all. The digital material in the Collection Online is carefully interlinked and can be navigated in various ways.
AAA aims to make available online as much of the material it houses as possible. The initial launch of the Collection Online provides access to material from AAA’s talk programmes and three Special Collections. These include Another Life: The Digitised Personal Archive of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram; The Chabet Archive: Covering Fifty Years of the Artist’s Materials; and The Mao Xuhui Collection, The Zhang Peili Archive, and The Zhang Xiaogang Collection, all of which are part of Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980–1990. The material in the Collection Online will steadily increase over time to offer multiple entry points into the recent histories of the region.
AAA has also launched Field Notes, a tri-annual bilingual (English and Chinese) e-journal with The And: An Expanded Questionnaire on the Contemporary. This inaugural issue, with contributions from over 40 scholars, critics, curators, and artists—including Rasheed Aaraeen, Senake Bandaranayake, Kurt Chan, David Clarke, Patrick Flores, Gao Shiming, Tapati Guha Thakurta, Atreyee Gupta, Hu Fang, Joan Kee, Naiza Khan, Hyunjin Kim, Martina Koppel-Yang, Lee Wengchoy, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, Iola Lenzi, Raqs Media Collective, Vidya Shivadas, Karen Smith, David The, and Reiko Tomii—addresses a theme that is central not only to AAA, but is one of the most vexing topics in recent years: the notion of the ‘contemporary in art,’ with specificity to the contexts of Asia. Field Notes is downloadable in print-friendly PDF format.
AAA’s digitisation project is sponsored by The Hong Kong Jockey Club and ARTstor.
About Asia Art Archive
Asia Art Archive is a non-profit organisation dedicated to documenting the recent history of contemporary art in Asia within an international context. Founded in 2000, AAA is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading public resources for contemporary Asian art and it continues to grow through a systematic programme of research. AAA is committed to creating a collection that belongs to the public; the collection is accessible free of charge from AAA’s physical space and searchable from anywhere in the world via its online catalogue. Through public, educational, and residential programmes, AAA instigates critical thinking and dialogue that generate new ideas and works that continually reshape the Archive itself. Please visit www.aaa.org.hk for more details.
