asia art archive

The exhibition ‘Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys’ stems from Asia Art Archive’s research since 2014 into the personal archive of the late Hong Kong–based artist Ha Bik Chuen (1925–2009). The curator for the show, Michelle Wong, invited artists to respond to the artist’s archive, stretching the possibilities of archival work. In this interview Wong shares details about the research on Ha Bik Chuen and the conceptualisation of the exhibition.

Özge Ersoy is a curator and writer; Public Programmes Lead at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; and the Managing Editor at m-est.org. Her work interrogates sociopolitical milieus while thinking through the threads that exist between exhibition-making, text, archival practices and collecting. SOUTH SOUTH interviewed Ersoy to find out more about her practice and to get a peek at the list of publications that have been her companions over the past year.

‘Crafting Communities’ was an exhibition that took place at the Asia Art Archive Library in Hong Kong in 2020, and considered the history of ‘Womanifesto’; a feminist biennial programme active in Thailand from 1997 to 2008 that created space for women artists in an art scene dominated by men. ‘Crafting Communities’ forms part of the work that Asia Art Archive is doing with ‘Womanifesto’ to digitise their archive. The exhibition supplemented efforts to make the significance of ‘Womanifesto’ visible through access to materials and highlighting the impact their programming.