The (Im)possibility of Art Archives

“This ambitious book provides a timely platform to celebrate contemporary art and curatorial practices in Asia working on, through and with visual archives. With the diverse range of contributions to reinventing the notion of ‘archive’, the ‘old’ is renewed.” —Jiang Jiehong, author of The Art of Contemporary China

This edited volume aims to fill the gap in the research, juxtaposition, and focused discussions in the existing literature on art archives in Asia. Most of the archives included in the book are independent and initiated by individuals, folk groups, or non-profit organizations. In this book, one can trace the dynamics and selfgenerative capacity in this particular historical and cultural milieu through these “alternative” archives and through the practices of artists and curators who apply their specific understanding of archive to their works. Many chapters resonate with each other in that they capture the experiences shared by many places in Asia. Those experiences could have resulted from the encounter with the Western idea of archive, the influence of the colonial experience, or a memory crisis triggered by the rapid transformation of media, and may serve as a basis for producing archive theories in/from Asia. The book provides an opportunity for the archives in Asia and those who work around them to recognize one another, understand what their colleagues in archival work do, how they do it and what else there is for them to do.

Lu Pan is Associate Professor at Department of Chinese History and Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.