Since the 1950s, there has been an active production of experimental film, animation, and video art in Asia. Yet, much of this work has not been consistently conserved or shared with the public due to the lack of accessible archives or organized collections dedicated to its preservation and dissemination.

The conference “The Archival Impulse: Collecting and Conserving the Moving Image in Asia” took place on September 10, 2015 in the The Celeste Bartos Theater at the Museum of Modern Art. Co-organized by Asia Art Archive in America, Collaborative Cataloging Japan, and MoMA’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP), it brought together archiving initiatives that have emerged in recent years across Asia, presenting an opportunity to rethink and share methods, philosophies, and challenges to archiving moving image and time-based media works. The event is divided into three panels.

In the first panel Developing Collections, Hiroko Tasaka, Farah Wardani, Fang Lu, and moderator Stuart Comer introduce collection strategies and compare archiving techniques at their respective organizations in Japan, Singapore, China, and New York. Keeping in mind the different regional contexts, the panel will explore the following issues: What was the impetus behind the development of these collections? What are the urgencies to which these collections respond? How do these collections expand upon existing art historical narratives? Complicating these questions is the complex nature of moving image and media works, which often blurs the boundary between disciplines and requires ongoing reevaluation of the organizational categories within institutions. Hiroko Tasaka introduces the collecting practice at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, covering 19th century film and film production, film history of Japan and Asia, and international artists of today. Recognizing the discontinuities and missing links in the field of Southeast Asian art historiography, Farah Wardani discusses the collection strategies taken at the National Gallery Singapore Resource Centre, where she serves as Assistant Director. Fang Lu talks about how Video Bureau, an artist-run video archive founded in 2012, structures the archival process, and how this project is situated in the Chinese contemporary art world.

Archiving is never just about collecting and safeguarding materials; it is also about how to share and circulate these materials, and bring them into a rhizomatic network of knowledge. With the rise of digital modes of access, archiving initiatives are faced with a plentitude of possibilities, as well as new challenges, such as the privatization and commodification of information. In the second panel, Opening the Digital Vault, archivists Sen Uesaki, David Smith, Alf Chang, and moderator Ben Fino-Radin explore the transition from a static physical archive to a digital infrastructure that is open, nonlinear, web-like, and constantly evolving. They will also share their experience in emerging technologies, examining different ways to effectively digest, preserve, and distribute media works in the digital age. Taking a cue from the discussions on collecting practices in the first panel, Sen Uesaki reexamines the physical and digital natures of archival and artistic material by questioning its physical existence in the first place, exploring its function as information. David Smith discusses Asia Art Archive’s digital presence and the motivations behind its current restructuring efforts, looking at the relationship between the archivist, the collections, and the public. Alf Chang will introduce the history and archive of ETAT, an ongoing experiment started from 1995 to create an autonomous platform for sharing, interaction, and preservation.

In the third panel, Transforming Stories, Mariam Ghani, Go Hirasawa, Huang Chien-Hung, and moderator Jane DeBevoise discuss research projects that develop out of archival materials. Pointing to diverse sources of information, from personal archives to commercial and state-sponsored media production, these projects represent efforts to expand and add nuance to ways of thinking about history, politics, and collective memory. Mariam Ghani will present What we left unfinished, a long-term research, film, and dialogue project centered around five unfinished films commissioned, produced, and canceled by various iterations of the Afghan state. Go Hirasawa introduces his research, preservation, and curatorial projects focusing on two Japanese filmmakers—Masao Adachi and Motoharu Jonouchi—in order to examine how established narratives about certain works or artists may be reconsidered and reconstructed. Huang Chien-Hung presents Liu Asio’s documentary project that traces the life of an anti-communist hero, proposing a possibility to think of a topological Asia, an Asia not based on geography, nations, or races, but on interrelations between events, media, persons and the production of images.

The post The Archival Impulse: Collecting and Conserving the Moving Image in Asia appeared first on post.

These were bold claims at a time when there was almost no commercial market for Chinese contemporary art. And they were backed up by a bold experiment—an exhibition of work by more than 350 artists, most of whom were under the age of forty. All of the artwork in the exhibition was available for sale, and, in addition, the artists who made the top twenty-seven artworks, as judged by a youthful group of jurors, were eligible to receive large cash rewards.² These awards ranged from 10,000 RMB for third place to 50,000 RMB for first place, an extraordinary amount of money at a time when few Chinese citizens made more than 3,000 RMB a year.³

Called the Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair (“Art Fair” is missing from the Chinese title), this exhibition took place in a hotel in the southern Chinese capital of Guangdong Province from October 8 to October 28, 1992.⁴ It was launched with start-up funds provided by a Chengdu-based entrepreneur whose company made car parts, and its goal was to make a profit.

The Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair was prescient. It foresaw the development of an active art market for contemporary Chinese oil painting. It anticipated the art fairs and their not-so-distant cousins, the domestic biennials that sprang up all over China and other parts of Asia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But it also launched a virulent debate that continues to this day.

Did the art market offer contemporary artists a credible alternative to the state system of control in the wake of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen tragedy, when experimental art was barred from most government-sponsored venues and media platforms? Did this alternative system open a new space for legitimization of and support for artists looking for independence and a measure of personal freedom? Or was commerce a contaminant that lured artists with the promise of short-term financial rewards, sapping art of its criticality and edge, as many critics have contended, then and now? Did it strengthen the hands of foreign buyers with their greater purchasing power, thus unduly influencing artistic taste and trends?

By most accounts, the experiment failed to achieve its goals. From the perspective of today, the Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair could be construed as an overly literal response to Deng Xiaoping’s call to accelerate economic reform after his famous 1992 tour of southern China, which has been encapsulated in the catchphrase “To get rich is glorious.”⁵ Even one of the main organizers, Chengdu-based art writer and cultural entrepreneur Lü Peng, has admitted that his goals were unrealistic, even naive. The timing was premature, the structure of the project was flawed, and the company that provided its main support went bankrupt.⁶ Its prematurity and flawed execution aside, the exhibition’s basic premise was resisted by many in the art world. Contemporary artists created performances to express their displeasure. Two participants sprayed Lysol throughout the exhibition to disinfect the “contaminated” space.⁷ Another distributed bogus shares in a commercial art company named after himself.⁸ And preeminent art critic Li Xianting reportedly became so disturbed after attending the opening event that he wept.⁹ Other criticisms were aimed at the Biennial’s provincialism. Many of the participants, including the organizers, judges, and artists came from the southern and southwestern provinces of China, a bias that some critics saw as unbalanced and limiting.¹⁰

However, there were certain central issues that most young critics agreed upon. First, it was time to establish an alternative system of legitimization of and support for contemporary art, one based on critical and academic analysis rather than on bureaucratic and political credentials required by the state. And second, as Lü Peng asserted in a 1992 article in the magazine Art and Market, this alternative system and the standards underlying its voracity should be determined by the Chinese people themselves.¹¹ China’s state-sponsored cultural apparatus was stifling and the hyper-conservatism of the prevailing standards of politically correct art were a constant irritant. Nevertheless, in the minds of these idealists, the emergence of buyers from outside China was also irritating, as they were considered equally misguided, patronizing artists many young critics deemed unworthy.¹²

Criticizing foreign patronage of the arts was not new. As early as 1979, then–Chairman of the Chinese Artists Association Jiang Feng inveighed against the degrading influence of foreign buyers on the production of artists who, he wrote, were churning out inferior works in pursuit of material gain.¹³ Although not the first to identify these pernicious tendencies, the organizers of the Guangzhou Biennial were among the first to attempt to construct a serious domestic system of support for experimental art, one based on domestic financial support and patrons, a domestic legal structure and contracts, and standards determined by local professionals, in particular young academicians and critics.

These aspirations, which were at once professional and nationalistic, again anticipated the development later in the decade. For example, Zhang Qing in the preface of the catalogue of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale railed against “patrons from embassy districts and galleries hosted by foreigners” who “exerted a strong aesthetic influence on local artists who were kept busy producing lucrative ‘new paintings for export’ with amazing speed and quantity.”¹⁴ In this preface Zhang also expressed heightened concerns about the international biennale circuit that had developed apace during the 1990s and worried that if the Chinese did not take action, “the yardstick . . . for admission would be held exclusively in foreign curators’ hands.”¹⁵ In Zhang’s mind the 2000 Shanghai Biennale was a serious attempt, like the Guangzhou Biennale had been eight years before, to “reshape the existing exhibition system,” and to develop critera determined by Chinese (and Asian) scholars.¹⁶

In hindsight, that the Guangzhou Biennale failed to achieve its unrealistic aspirations is understandable. The disparity in purchasing power between China and other industrialized countries was, in the 1990s, too great to overcome, such that, along with the exorable wave of global capital, Chinese products including art were swept offshore to Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the wealthier West. And it is only now, in the 2010s, that this tide might be turning, at least in the art world.¹⁷ But despite its multiple failures, the Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair did anticipate the importance of the role of the burgeoning art market in the development of contemporary Chinese art and succeeded in offering some experimental artists (mostly painters working in oil) an alternative to the state system of support that had previously controlled art’s production, circulation, and value. In this regard, it is interesting to note that works by ten of the top twenty-seven prizewinners of the Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair—Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhou Chunya, Wang Guangyi, Ye Yongqing, Leng Jun, Mo Yan, Mao Xuhui, Shu Qun, and Guan Ce—regularly go for top prices in today’s international auction market.¹⁸ And further, although it did not forestall the threat of moving Chinese contemporary art offshore and into the hands of foreign buyers, the Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair did give tangible shape to the desire among many artists and art practitioners to establish an independent and domestic art infrastructure based on local scholarship, local critical discourse, and local patronage, a project that continues today to be a complicated but important work in process.

The post The 1992 Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair appeared first on post.