Meet the Institutions | Asia Art Archive

Asia Art Archive was created with an urgent goal: to give the Asia Pacific region’s local art history the place it deserved. Founded shortly after the 1997 handover, the Hong Kong non-profit organization has over the last two decades fostered influential alternatives to traditional Western narratives. Today, it holds over 80,000 documents on recent art in Asia in its collection.
Collecting was always only one aspect of AAA’s purview, however. ‘From the beginning, AAA was conceived as more than a static collection of material waiting for a scholar to pull it out,’ says Co-founder and Executive Director Claire Hsu. ‘It was always meant to be active.’ In this intimate video, she introduces the organization’s many activities - which have included hundreds of public programs, collaborations with other archives from Singapore to Pakistan, and sustained operations in India and the US - and explains why regional art history is more vital than ever.