Field Notes (Asia Art Archive)
Asia Art Archive is a catalyst for new ideas that enrich our understanding of the world through the collection, creation, and sharing of knowledge around recent art in Asia.
"Field Notes" is an e-journal curated by the Asia Art Archives. The journal is both a thinking exercise that is meant to unknot some of AAA's core concerns and a contribution to critical thinking and writing from Asia.
Series Titles
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Published in 2012, the e-journal’s inaugural issue, with contributions from over 40 scholars, critics, curators, and artists, addresses a theme that is central not only to AAA, but is one of the most vexed topics in recent years: the notion of the “contemporary in art,” with specificity to the contexts of Asia. Acknowledging Hal Foster and Terry Smith’s “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’” in the Fall 2009 issue of October, as well as writings by John Clark and Joan Kee amongst others, we invited curators, artists, critics, and academics from Asia to contribute their thoughts on the topic. As an archive of ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
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 ...
