Asia Art Archive and the International Program of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, are honoured to host Salima Hashmi as our distinguished speaker for AAA's Annual Artist’s Lecture. A prominent artist, educator, art historian, and activist based in Lahore, Hashmi will share her extensive experience in documenting, organising, and writing about the work of women artists in Pakistan. Hashmi’s lecture will provide insights into her publications, her role as one of the founding members of the Women’s Action Forum (a women’s rights organisation in Pakistan), her efforts to foster regional alliances for gender justice, and her mentorship of generations of artists.

A breakfast reception will be held at the library from 10–11am. The breakfast reception and talk are both free and open to the public.

To RSVP, please visit here.

Venue address: 11/F Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan

Co-presented with M+, Art+Feminism: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2025 brings participants together to discuss, create, and improve Wikipedia articles about women and non-binary artists and makers from Asia. Organised with the assistance of the Wikimedia Community User Group in Hong Kong, this event is part of ‘Art+Feminism’—an international initiative that strives to close information gaps related to gender, feminism, and the arts. It is also part of Asia Art Archive and M+’s ongoing effort to contribute to discussions about the representation of art and visual culture in Asia on open-source knowledge platforms.

08.03.2025: 2:00pm–5:30pm

Venue address: 11/F Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan

Join us for a conversation about the immeasurability of time with Lee Weng Choy, Simon Leung, Gala Porras-Kim, and Merve Ünsal—four artists and writers who have created new work for AAA’s upcoming exhibition, Countering Time.  

How does time resist precise measurement? How does it counter and elude while remaining numbered at the same time? This conversation invites the participating artists and writers to discuss ideas of archival time, impermanence, ghosts, and artistic speculation. They speak about their own artworks as well as personal and shared references, including films and poems. 

This event marks the opening of Countering Time, an exhibition featuring new works by Lee Weng Choy, Simon Leung, Gala Porras-Kim, and Merve Ünsal. Ünsal uses her body to record a centuries-old sinkhole where human and geological time collapse. Leung bends and folds the afterlives of a moment captured in a 1967 photograph from Hong Kong. Porras-Kim traces recollections of lost works and archives. Lee uses personal annotations to mark time. Together, they tune in, refract, exhume, and annotate artworks, archival records, and past events, demonstrating how archives are sites of imagination instead of final resting places of historical records.  

Registration link.

Venue address: CCG Library, Asia Art Archive

Join us for a conversation with scholars Lui Tai Lok, Patrick Mok, and Kwong Chi Man discussing their experiences and insights on archival research in Hong Kong.

The exhibition Another Day in Hong Kong, currently on view at AAA’s library, draws on archival materials to reconstruct a day from the past, aiming to inspire new perspectives on contemporary art and history in Hong Kong. For AAA’s Research team, a major takeaway from the project was the opportunity to survey local archives and learn from their archival practices.

To explore this thread further, this conversation will focus on how researchers utilise local archives to conduct research on Hong Kong’s cultural and social histories. Scholars Lui Tai Lok, Patrick Mok, and Kwong Chi Man will share their experiences in conducting archival research in Hong Kong, their observations on local archival practices, and discuss notable practices or challenges they encountered when accessing archives. Moderated by Anthony Yung, this conversation aims to provide an overview of archival resources on Hong Kong histories, and promote the importance of building systematic and sustainable archival practices across various fields.

Free and open to the public with registration. This event will be conducted in Cantonese, with no simultaneous interpretation provided.

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 6:30–8pm

Join us for a talk by Iftikhar Dadi reflecting on Pop South Asia, an exhibition that spotlighted artworks engaging with popular culture in South Asia.  

Pop South Asia: Artistic Explorations in the Popular was a major exhibition on South Asian art engaging with popular culture. Spanning works from the mid-twentieth century to the present, the exhibition showcased an intergenerational dialogue through more than 100 artworks by artists from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and its diasporas. It spotlighted artists who intervene in the aesthetics of print, cinematic and digital media, alongside those engaging with devotional practices, crafts, and folk culture; it presented artists addressing modes of local capitalism, from large-scale industries to vernacular bazaars, in company with those commenting on identity, politics, and borders.  

Pop South Asia framed the region as a vantage point into developments that are regional and global, as much as they are subnational and national. It consequently brought to light practices relevant to parallel regions across the world, equally shaped by forces of capitalism and media as they continue to modernise and urbanise.  

Free and open to the public with registration. 

AAA invites four individuals from Hong Kong’s independent arts organisations to join us as guest researchers. Over the course of several weeks, they will delve into AAA’s Hong Kong collection, offering distinct perspectives informed by their varied expertise. This endeavour seeks to bring fresh insight into the archive not limited by the confines of traditional academic research, and aims to locate creative potential embedded within historical records.

Hong Kong Conversations 2023: Independent Researcherskicks off AAA’s two-year project Recalling Disappearance: Hong Kong Contemporary Art. The project aims to promote knowledge about Hong Kong art, with a focus on creating and sharing archives, and seeks to foster creative, scholarly, curatorial, and educational endeavours related to Hong Kong art.

Free and open to the public with registration. This event will be conducted in Cantonese, with English simultaneous interpretation provided. Please register separately for each talk.

Venue address: CCG Library, Asia Art Archive, Sheung Wan

This year’s Annual Artist’s Lecture, hosted at CCG Library, welcomes Ade Darmawan and farid rakun from ruangrupa as our guest speakers. ruangrupa is a Jakarta-based contemporary art collective that provides platforms for exhibitions, workshops, critical thinking, and research. Most recently, ruangrupa provided collective artistic direction based on the core values of lumbung for documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany. In this conversation, Darmawan and rakun reflect on the historical conditions that make independent art spaces necessary, as well as recent debates on collectivity and resource sharing in the arts. 

ruangrupa is a Jakarta-based collective established in 2000. It is a non-profit organisation that fosters arts thinking within urban and cultural contexts by engaging artists with other disciplines such as the social sciences, politics, technology, and media to open up critical observations and perspectives towards contemporary urban issues in Indonesia

A breakfast reception will be held at the library from 10–11am. 

Free Public Access. RSVP required. 

To RSVP, please contact Rebecca Tso at registration@aaa.org.hk

This talk is held in conjunction with Learning What Can’t Be Taught, an exhibition about art education in China from the 1950s to the 2000s, featuring case studies of three generations of artists from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou (previously known as the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts). The exhibition focuses on the experience of these artists and how they influenced the next generation with a spirit of experimentation, encouraging them to creatively explore different artistic expressions.

The talk will be led by Anthony Yung, AAA Researcher and co-curator of the exhibition. Yung will give an introduction to the development of tertiary art education in China through the decades, its changing sociopolitical contexts, and how art teachers and students in China have promoted artistic innovation and freedom under the specific limits of different eras.

Register here.

In this talk, architects, artists, and educators Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti discuss the urgency to move away from the usual binary used to describe refugees, migrants, and hospitality: one either lives a temporary life in a refugee camp, or becomes a citizen with a permanent residency permit.

Free and open to the public with registration

Venue address: 11/F Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan

View more than 70 works of art in person at the opening reception of AAA’s annual fundraiser auction. Asia Art Archive’s annual auction offers works of art generously donated by artists, galleries, and collectors. It is an essential source of support for AAA, raising more than half of the annual budget.

Register here.

Venue address: Christie’s, 22/F, Alexandra House, 18 Chater Road, Central

This panel will discuss the importance of performance art within the ecology of artist collectives and arts festivals. As part of Asia Art Archive’s public programmes for the exhibition Form Colour Action at AAA Library, Circuits of Performance is inspired by the artist Lee Wen’s work as an arts organiser and a pioneer in the development of performance art in Asia.

Venue: A Space, 10/F, Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan

Please register for event.