AAA Public Programmes Curator Ingrid Chu explored the international phenomenon of the ‘art book bag’ in a short history of the art book bag (and the things that go in them). Using the last 15 years as a guide, the exhibition featured ‘the things that go in them’—art publications, magazines, and related ephemera—alongside a vast array of these popular totes in the AAA Library. Chu invited artists, curators, art book fair organisers, and print and online publishers to provide insight into the changing modes of knowledge production and circulation, and their influence on recent art of Asia. An associated public talk, ...

Hong Kong-based artist Samson Young moved through various locations in and around AAA by way of a roving sound station— doubling as a bookmobile and deejay booth—to generate a series of public broadcasts. His project AAAFM99.3 invoked classic radio programmes with news announcements, interview segments, and commercials incorporating ambient noise sourced from AAA’s audio collection.

The second issue of Field Notes continues to address AAA’s core questions, examining the manifestations of Asia, its methodologies, maps, networks, and geographies. This issue proposes the archive as a method to illustrate the way in which initiatives like AAA are taking the archive to counter, complicate, and reimagine systems in which narratives of modern and contemporary art are being produced, circulated, and understood. How do archives of today respond to contemporary conditions through practice? What can an archive look like – what forms does it take (published anthologies, network of archives, physical archive, exhibition platform, online database)? Who are the ...

Jaffna-based visual artist and art educator Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan responded to the AAA collection by drawing parallels between methods of archiving and art making, while delving into the idea of ‘home’ within the context of ethnic conflict.

Solomon Benjamin and Wing Shing Tang, Hong Kong and Bangalore-based scholars of critical geography and urban studies led a set of workshops and walks in Framing Spatial Stories: Life Beyond the Plan, Survey, and Grid to consider the politics of contested urban settings through the lens of recent art of Asia.

The third issue of Field Notes addresses the constant question of how AAA defines “Asia” but is in no way intended to survey or comprehensively cover any of the entry points in how to map Asia. Instead, it is to point to the entanglements between them and provide an additional space, along with AAA’s other projects, to construct reference points and connections across time, sites, and geographies. We realize that there is something about the positioning of Asia, Art, and Archive next to each other that presupposes a mapping process. Acknowledging both the value and limitations of the map as a ...

Recognised for her work in ‘immersive journalism’, Nonny de la Peña drew from the Asia Art Archive collection to create a new iteration of an earlier performance by Lin Yilin that pushes the boundaries of virtual reality and digital technology.

Zoe Butt formerly of Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City, and facilitator of AAA’s 2011 Mobile Library programme in Vietnam, contributed a text to AAA’s e-journal Field Notes. Butt looks at Practising Friendship as a platform that is integral to the longevity of particular kinds of arts infrastructures. Concentrating on those considered independent, ‘alternative,’ and archival in spirit, Butt also investigates a method of working strategically under conditions with political or cultural restrictions.

Pakistan-based artist Rashid Rana inquired into the possibilities of fiction to construct multiple pasts through notes, images, and schematic representations of his collaborative work-in- progress Present Elsewhere.

Artist Marysia Lewandowska, 2014/15 AAA resident contributed Property, Protest, Commons, and the Alternative Economies of Art, a series of public workshops co-organized with curator Esther Lu, and co-presented with Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC). Leading towards Made in Public, a collectively generated project and publication, participants interrogated the relationship between art, property, protest, and the commons in the context of recent cultural and political events in Asia. A third workshop took place at TCAC from 18–20 September 2015.

The fourth issue of Field Notes is a part of a combined and distributed effort towards formulating a multivalent answer to the answer of how we remember exhibitions, and by extension, what knowledge is gained through the process. Exhibitions are where artworks meet their publics. In the context of Asia, with the general absence of systematic public collections and few academic art history departments, exhibitions are more than just sites of display and interaction. Exhibitions—and the curatorial strategies shaping them, institutional demands driving them, and art writing accompanying them—have become the primary sites of art historical construction. The last decade has seen ...