How a Hong Kong institution rewrote art history

From Singapore to Pakistan, Asia Art Archive maps out alternative narratives – co-founder Claire Hsu takes Art Basel behind the scenes

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 handover of Hong Kong to China by the British in 1997, 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.

Director: Luke Casey
Director of photography and color: Lee Butcher
Sound: Jacky Luk
Assistant camera: Klaus Wu
Production: Art Basel