Gwangju International Center

SPEAKER: Michelle Wong

CO-WRITER:​ Dettya

GIC TALK DATE: May 21, 2016

GIC TALK TITLE: Introduction to Asia Art Archive

Michelle Wong is a researcher at Asia Art Archive. Based in Hong Kong, she drives the Archive’s research projects in the city, including the recently launched Hong Kong Art History Research Pilot Project, in collaboration with the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Prior to joining AAA, she received her education in music and philosophy at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA and in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, United Kingdom. Her research interests include mapping, magazines, and the intersections of sound, space, and technology.

Michelle works at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, and in this GIC Talk she introduce about Asia Art Archive and some research projects she is spearheading about Hong Kong art history.

Michelle started her talk with lively energy and explained about the research around contemporary art in Asia. She said people usually ask questions to her about “How do you design Asia?”, and she has a pretty interesting answer about it. She said that, for us Asia is liquid, it not bounded by national borders and it actually is an idea about how things are all inter-connected to one another.

During her GIC Talk, she presented us a picture of the library in the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, which is open for public six days a week. She is also part of the research team of some project in the Asia Art Archive. She has been running projects in collaboration with museums as well as individuals to create material and research of art history. By working with that institutions and individuals, they were able to identify the key materials that are important in the contemporary art history. These projects are all inter-connected to one another, and the way to look at them is to see them as tools to help them understand what materials they have in the Archive, how they can point out the materials they don’t have and help identify new materials, as well as to find out what they can enable by making these materials available.

The project Michelle introduced in her GIC Talk is called Hong Kong Art History Research Pilot Project. It is a collaboration between Asia Art Archive and Hong Kong Museum of Art, which was Hong Kong’s first collecting institution, founded in 1962. This project is an endeavor to develop a shared platform that makes available materials that can facilitate research. What this project looks at is Hong Kong’s art ecology in the 1960s and 1970s and follows several lines of inquiry.

For this Pilot Project, they carried out five interviews. Michelle briefly went through the interviews, two of them being an interview of Liu Kuo-sung, a Taiwanese abstract painter who moved to Hong Kong in 1973 to take up a teaching post, and of Sandra Walters, an American who moved to Hong Kong in 1973.

Michelle Wong is passionate about her job, Hong Kong and also contemporary art history of Asia . She wants to give her best in every project, involving the community and introducing the Asia Art Archive to as many people as possible.