Wu Mo The Archive as a Site of Experiment: A Conversation with Claire Hsu nlike creating artworks, curating exhibitions and organizing art events, to work with an archive is to work outside of the sexiest Upart of the art world. In the traditional point of view, archival work, which involves the acts of collecting, categorizing and digitizing is mere mechanical labour. However, following “the archival turn” in contemporary art in recent years, the notion of “archive” is constantly being redefined and re-examined through curatorial and artistic practice. As Simone Osthoff insightfully states in Performing the Archive, these practices are producing an “ontological change . from the archive as a repository of documents to the archive as a dynamic and generative production tool.”1 It is evident that archive poses new challenges for all art institutions particularly for Asia Art Archive (AAA), a non-profit organization that takes archive as the centerpiece of its mission. Founded in Hong Kong in 2000, AAA has witnessed massive changes in both the local and regional art scene. After Claire Hsu, its Co-Founder and Executive Director, finished her master’s degree in Art History in London (Johnson Chang was also a co-founder and Jane DeBevoise has been Chair since 2003), she found it almost impossible to get systematically organized materials to support her research. In response to such lack, she decided to set up a free archive after she returned to Hong Kong. With the help of the local and regional art community, she collected materials ranging from books, exhibition catalogues and monographs, to ephemeral materials such as invitation cards and clippings manually cut out from print media, something unimaginable in the digital age. After more than sixteen years of its development, AAA is a crucial part of Hong Kong art ecology.2 Although it started to address the urgent need to build an art archive, which is part of a much needed knowledge infrastructure in the region, its current approach and strategies are not limited to enabling research alone. Instead, by conducting diverse public programs, projects, and publications, AAA has gradually formed its methodology, which is to constantly engage and activate its archival collection. The key issue with respect to the new methodologies of activating the archive that AAA has developed in the past few years is the process of how it sets up and implements its content priorities within its own contexts. AAA has identified five content priorities, which have evolved during the past decade and are reviewed annually: 1) exhibition histories, art Vol. 16 No. 4 25 writing, and pedagogy, 2) complex geographies in Asia , 3) performance Exhibition documentation of First Choice, 1977, curated art, 4) innovation through tradition, and 5) women in art history. In its by art critic Nigel Cameron. Courtesy of the Ha family and institutional practice during the past sixteen years, AAA has focused on Asia Art Archive. these five priorities, which are manifested in a series of AAA’s archival collections and projects, such as Materials of the Future: Contemporary Chinese Art in the 1980s, The Ha Bik Chuen Archive3 and its propositions about the construction of Hong Kong art history, the Bibliography of Modern and Contemporary Art Writing of South Asia (in thirteen languages from India but some of which seep borders to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka), The Baroda Archives, The Joan Lebold Cohen Archive, the Mapping Asia exhibition, the Sites of Construction symposium, and more. In addition, community sharing Photograph of Joan Lebold Cohen interviewing Yuan and collaborative ways of Yunsheng, Beijing, 1979. Courtesy of Joan Lebold working are one of the main Cohen and Asia Art Archive. methodologies of AAA, which has worked with four hundred local schools/universities over the last eight years, providing courses and training to both teachers and students. For most of its existence, AAA has been fully aware of its position as a catalyst in the eco-system of large-scale public institutions, educational institutions, private foundations and the commercial galleries. It positions itself to play multiple roles while maintaining its independence. However, maintaining independence in Hong Kong is extremely tough for a medium-scale non-profit organization. Despite the fact that Hong 26 Vol. 16 No. 4 Mapping Asia exhibition at Asia Art Archive library, 2014. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive. Kong’s high rent prevents AAA’s physical expansion, it is also a challenge for AAA to avoid repeating what other similar organizations are doing. To some extent, the relatively slow pace of AAA’s improvements to its hardware and software as well as certain characteristics of AAA’s institutional practice raise many questions: How can AAA examine “Asia” through the archive? How does AAA balance its budget across the different regions it represents? How can AAA make its collection accessible to the global audiences? AAA has acted much more like an experimental site for building hybrid models than just a library with document storage; in this respect, its institutional practice vividly resonates with Jacques Derrida’s viewpoint in Archive Fever: “the question of the archive . is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in the times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in the times to come, later on or perhaps never.”4 Wu Mo: How does AAA balance the archive collection from different regions of Asia, and does it require different strategies and research methodologies? Claire Hsu: As we are based in Hong Kong, which is a Special Administrative Region of China, it is easier to get funding for China and Hong Kong related projects. We are, however, constantly aware of the “Asia” in our name and of the importance of opening up multiple sites of entry into the recent history of art of the region, so we ensure that we allocate no more than 50-60% of our resources to Hong Kong and China. We want to make sure that this balance is reflected in our research, collections, and programs, as well as in the different members of our team located in Hong Kong, New Delhi, and New York. We have different methodologies for working on different collections. When a collection is proposed by a researcher at AAA, the proposal goes through an acquisition process during which we consider how it relates to our content priorities, builds upon or offers a different counter point to other research collections, the urgency and state of the material, the resources available, and, finally, whether these materials are already highly disseminated or likely to be worked on by another institution. Vol. 16 No. 4 27 Ha Bik Chuen’s documentation of his sculptures and self- portrait, circa 2000s. Courtesy of the Ha family and Asia Art Archive. Opposite page, top: Billboard with political slogans, circa early 1980s. Courtesy of Joan Lebold Cohen and Asia Art Archive. Opposite page, middle: Sketching class at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, circa 1979. Courtesy of Joan Lebold Cohen and Asia Art Archive. Opposite page, bottom: Ai Weiwei and his work, New York, circa 1987. Courtesy of Joan Lebold Cohen and Asia Art Archive. As for the different methodologies in bringing the collections into the public domain, let me give you some examples. Thanks to a three year grant from the Hong Kong Jockey Club, we moved the archive of Ha Bik Chuen, which covers forty years of Hong Kong exhibition history, to an industrial project space in Fotan. Instead of us deciding what framework we are going to use to deal with the archive, we are inviting scholars, artists, and educators to come in, work on the archive and help us to think through which areas of this archive should be priviledged (there are over five hundred boxes of material) and how it should be contextualized. The Ha Bik Chuen Archive is huge and occupies a 2,000-square-foot surface of shelves and boxes. We are not interested in just mindlessly digitizing everything, but, instead, want this to be an open and collaborative process among those who have a stake in this work. Another example, for the Detail of a collage book constructed by Ha Bik Chuen. Joan Cohen Archive, (which Courtesy of the Ha family and Asia Art Archive. contains 16,500 slides of images documenting art and life in China and Asia from the 1970s to the 2000s. we used a very different process, which we refer to as “quick cataloging.” The idea behind this is to share this archive publicly as quickly as possible even though it means that any annotation may be sparse. This decision was based on its size, the nature of the material (in this case all slides), and the fact that it was already well catalogued. Wu Mo: What kind of role do the researchers play in this process? Claire Hsu: They are in many ways the brain trust of AAA and are responsible for developing projects, scoping and identifying new archives, working closely with the collections team in developing a framework for these archives once a decision to digitize them has been made, and then working closely with the programs team to circulate them and bring them to life. The Head of Research is in charge of overseeing the different strands of 28 Vol. 16 No. 4 Vol. 16 No. 4 29 research being undertaken at any one time, balancing the geographical and content priorities, and developing lines of enquiry that ensure we are asking the right questions of ourselves as well as shining new light on the field.