- 11 July 2017
Today the staff at the Paul Mellon Centre had the pleasure of welcoming Michelle Wong, a researcher at the Asia Art Archive to give an introduction talk to the Archive and the work undertaken by researchers and archivists there.
Based in Hong Kong, the Asia Art Archive was established in 2000 as a response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region. Since then the AAA has made one of the most valuable collections of material on art freely available from its website, which has recently been redesigned to enhance the way the collection can be viewed and accessed.
Michelle also talked through some of the Archiving processes undertaken at the AAA, focussing particularly on the archive of Ha Bik Cheun. Ha Bik Cheun was a self taught artist who delved into a range of visual arts including painting, photography and sculpture. After his death in 2009 he left behind a huge cache of photographs, exhibition documentation and (a recent discovery by the AAA archivists) over 170 albums of collages compiled by Cheun himself. The work on the Ha Bik Cheun Archive is still ongoing but already his collection, particularly his dedication to documenting exhibitions, is seen as invaluable in recording Hong Kong's art history. You can read more about the Ha Bik Cheun Archive and the ongoing work on cataloguing the Archive here.
Courtesy of the Ha family and Asia Art Archive, Ha Bik-chuen and his son at Henry Moore sculptures exhibition, Hong Kong City Hall, 1970,
The Paul Mellon Centre will be working in collaboration with the Asia Art Archive for the ongoing London, Asia project, more information on this can be found here.
Thank you to Michelle for a fascinating introduction to the AAA!