Asia Art Archive in America

🗄️Digital Archive Highlight⁠

Highlights from the Zheng Shengtian Archive and his “Research on Chinese Art in the Socialist Period 社會主義時期中國藝術之研究”. Born in 1938, Zheng Shengtian came of age alongside the People’s Republic of China. He began his art education in Shanghai in 1949, the same year the PRC was founded, and later studied and taught at the prestigious Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (ZAFA) in Hangzhou. After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Zheng was appointed head of the Oil Painting and International Departments at ZAFA, where he mentored many of Chinese early avant-garde artists.
Maoist China has often been characterized as culturally monolithic, cut off from the West and defined by rigid adherence to narrowly proscribed rules. But the collection of rare exhibition catalogs and art publications in Zheng’s Archive complicates that storyline. Contrary to common knowledge, in the 1950s and 1960s China hosted many international art exhibitions that introduced many artistic traditions from a wide variety of countries around the world, albeit excluding the United States. These exhibitions and related publications included print making from Cuba and Mexico, images of cave murals from India and Korea, landscape painting from Australia, and craft traditions from Italy and Chile.
The range of these publications not only reflects the breadth of international cultural exchange between China and the outside world at that time, but they also provide evidence of the contemporary debate, before the Cultural Revolution that lasted from 1966-1976, around what constitutes national and socialist art forms in the early years of the Maoist regime.

Image selection and text by Digital Archive Fellows @11.2ideas , expanded and edited by Jane DeBevoise.

Image Credits in comments

🗄️Digital Archive Highlight

Highlights from the Sheba Chhachhi Archive. In 1979, Om Swaha emerged from the Autonomous Women’s Movement in New Delhi as a response to rising dowry killings. One of India’s first feminist street plays, Om Swaha was created by a collective of women who built the script from real, often autobiographical accounts of domestic violence. There was a mix of trained actors and activists, students, and artists learning to perform as they went.
Named after a Sanskrit chant used in wedding fire rituals, the play turns that language on itself, drawing from local dowry death cases. It was first staged at Indraprastha College for Women, then carried into the streets, performed outside police stations, in residential neighborhoods, and at protests across the city.
At times, the play returned to the sites it was responding to, staged outside homes where dowry deaths had taken place. People gathered. Some watched. Some stepped forward, sharing their own stories, asking for help. Around these performances conversations formed, and from those conversations, new forms of support and intervention began to take shape.
Sheba Chhachhi photographed from within the movement itself, moving between documenting and participating. “Across the 80’s, I built up a photographic record of the movement from within, pointing the camera one moment, shouting slogans the next.”
Image selection and words by Digital Archive Fellows @11.2ideas
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CHHACHHI Sheba. [Photo of Om Swaha (Mehrauli)]. 1980.⁠
CHHACHHI Sheba. [Photo of Om Swaha (Karol Bagh)]. 1980.⁠
CHHACHHI Sheba. [Photo of Om Swaha (India Gate Grounds)]. 1981.⁠
CHHACHHI Sheba. [Photo of Om Swaha (India Gate Grounds)]. 1981.⁠
CHHACHHI Sheba. [Photo of Anti-Dowry Sit-In (Police Station, Nangloi)].
CHHACHHI Sheba. [Photo of Om Swaha (India Gate Grounds)]. 1981.⁠
CHHACHHI Sheba. [Photo of Om Swaha (Karol Bagh)]. 1980.⁠
CHHACHHI Sheba. [Photo of Anti-Dowry Sit-In (Police Station, Nangloi)].
CHHACHHI Sheba. [Photo of Om Swaha (India Gate Grounds)]. 1981.

🗄️Digital Archive Highlight

In the Year of the Fire Horse, we return to Wang Gongyi (b. 1946), an artist who grew during one of the most tumultuous periods in recent Chinese history, including the Cultural Revolution. 

Wang’s archive brings together sketches, woodblock prints and photographs, from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, which included her travels in Europe in the 1980s. Even while abroad, she did not turn away from China. In her photographs and sketches, she returns time and time again to ink painting, classical Chinese literature, and historical figures with renewed clarity. Through her archive, we can see Wang work through discipline, frustration, restraint, and endurance. But she does not romanticize hardship. She studies it, observes it in others, tests it against her own life, and integrates it back into her work.

Her woodcut portrait of Qiu Jin (slide 7), created in China in 1980, sits within this arc. Carved in steady, restrained lines, the revolutionary appears composed rather than theatrical, asking: what does it mean to stand fully in one’s time without yielding to it?

Despite the constraints placed on her generation, Wang Gongyi models the ability to move forward without relinquishing her inner authority, to make room for herself, even when history did not readily grant it. The artist has recently shared, “So I often tell young people: Read ten thousand books and travel ten thousand miles. Reading helps you discover problems, but to truly understand, you must experience and immerse yourself in it.”

Image selection and words by Digital Archive Fellows @11.2ideas

1. [Group Photo of Wang Gongyi and Her Colleagues in Tianjin People’s Fine Arts Publishing House].  Oct 1978.
2. [Sketch By Wang Gongyi]. Aug 1979.
3. [Photograph of Wang Gongyi With a Friend]. 1986.
4. [Photograph of Wang Gongyi in Paris Sacred Heart Cathedral]. 1986.
5. [Notes from the Lecture of Roman J.Verostko at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts]. 1982.
6. [Horses]. 1983.
7. [Qiu Jin]. 1980.
8. [Associated Exhibition of Ten Women Printmaking Artists]. 1985.
9. [Group Photograph of Wang Gongyi with Friends]. 1986.
10. [Wang Gongyi Working in Her Studio]. 1987.

Please join us at the Whitney Museum of Art on Monday, March 9th at 6:30pm for an evening with artist Aki Onda () in conversation with composer and writer Bill Dietz () and art historian Patrick Flores.

Onda will share ongoing research on Filipino composer and ethnomusicologist José Maceda as part of their contribution to the Whitney Biennial 2026. Onda will discuss Maceda’s project “Ugnayan, Music for Twenty Radio Stations” (1974), a large-scale work broadcast simultaneously across Manila. The presentation will address the socio-political dimensions of the composition, particularly its relationship to the Marcos regime. In conversation with composer and writer Bill Dietz and art historian Patrick Flores, Onda will further situate Maceda’s practice within the context of the twentieth-century international avant-garde, while addressing its entanglement with the historical narratives of the Philippines.

This program is presented in partnership with The Whitney Museum of American Art and will be hosted at the Whitney Museum’s third floor theater space and via Zoom.

Friends of AAAinA will be offered a discount code for this program. To receive the discount code, please email [email protected]

On Thursday, 1/29, we are hosting artists Megumi Shauna Arai (), Gi (Ginny) Huo (), Melissa Joseph (), and curator Sofia Thiệu D’Amico (.thieu) for an evening of presentations and conversations.

“Return Flight: Diasporic Artists on Presenting Work in the ‘Motherland,’” will focus on each of the speaker's recent experiences of showcasing work in their ancestral homes. The evening will highlight their projects as well as the experiences of working as both an insider and outsider (or perhaps a third, different thing altogether), and the complexity of this type of “return.” A culminating conversation will be moderated by our Director of Programs, Collections, and Exhibitions, Claire Kim.

Please note that RSVPs are mandatory. Be sure to go to aaa.a-org to secure your spot!

🗄️Digital Archive Highlight

Founded in Thailand in the late 1990s, Womanifesto emerged as an artist-led initiative centering women’s voices, labor, and lived experience across Southeast Asia. Rather than operating through fixed institutions, it unfolded slowly shaped by place, relationships, and time.

In the archive, feminism takes form through practice. Meeting notes, shared meals, handwritten plans, and photographs of creative work show how art was inseparable from daily life. Textile and handweaving practices recur, revealing how women’s everyday domestic labor, like stitching and weaving, became the foundation of artistic practice. What is often understood as home duty appears instead as knowledge carried directly into art.

What ultimately stands out is an earlier model of women-centered arts organizing that grew organically over time, working with what already existed in the home. Womanifesto shows how shared practice moved beyond the individual, becoming a collective movement that spread across the region.  

Image selection and words by Digital Archive Fellows @11.2ideas

1. [Arahmaini, Nitaya Ueareeworakul, and Varsha Nair at Studio Xang].   1997. 
2. “Womanifesto 1999 as a Proclamation of International Women’s Art.” SeeSan.
3. JIRASURADEJ, Lawan. Hands in the Coop.   2001. Black and white photographs.
4.  [Opening Ceremony for Womanifesto II]. 27 Mar 1999.
5. CHEN, Qingqing. Women’s Cemetery (Set of 4 Photographs). Thailand, 1999. A pair of lotus shoes and a hundred withered roses.
6. HAMADA, Mayumi. [Thank You Note from Mayumi Hamada to Varsha Nair].
7. GLINSIRI, On-Anong. [Togetherness and the Way We Were: Pan Parahom — Detail]. 24 Oct 2008.
8. Photographs Selected for Press.  2008.
9. JIRASURADEJ, Lawan. Hands in the Coop. 2001. Black and white photographs.
10. SHARPLES, Jennifer, and Wiriya SUNGKHANIYOM. Portrait of the Artist as a Thai Woman. Bangkok: The Bangkok Post (Sunday Magazine), 10 – 16 Mar 1996.
11. [Archiving Womanifesto Exhibition — Exhibition View].   2019.
12. [Pavilion 8, The Bangkok Emergency House Project — Preparation. 1999.
13. HAMADA, Mayumi. Body Installation. Thailand, 1999. Performance.

We are thrilled to kick off the new year with a virtual conversation between artists Aya Rodriguez-Izumi () and Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork () with moderation by curator Fang-Tze Hsu on January 14th at 8pm. Rodriguez-Izumi and Kiyomi Gork are current participants in the Singapore Biennale 2025: pure intention (SB2025) and have each created new commissions through on-site interventions. Both artists explore their affiliations and relationships with the history of Okinawa and will be discussing their individual practices as well as recent projects. Hsu, as a member of the curatorial team for SB2025, will speak about the curatorial framework of the Biennale as well as the intersections between the artists’ practices.

For RSVPs to this online event, please click the link in our bio!

Image credit: Above: Aya Rodriguez-Izumi, Installation image of “Gate 3” Singapore Biennale 2025 Commission. Below: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Installation image of “HNZF (Harsh Noise Zen Fountains)” Singapore Biennale 2025 Commission.

🚨OPEN CALL🚨 We are thrilled to announce the 7th iteration of Leadership Camp! This program is a series of closed seminar-type discussions of selected texts with presentations by participants and guests which culminate in a final project or program.

This year’s Leadership Camp’s theme, “a̷s̷i̷a̷ ̷u̷n̷a̷u̷t̷h̷o̷r̷i̷z̷e̷d̷,” has been proposed by Umber Majeed () and Danielle Wu. The cohort will explore ideas of fraudulence, mimicry, and authenticity through the lens of Asian and Asian American identity,

Applications are due on Tuesday, December 16th. For more information and how to apply, please click the link in our bio.

Image credit: Umber Majeed, “Do not copyright”, Pencil on paper, 9 by 12 inches.

On Thursday 11/13, collaborators Lumi Tan (), Anh Vo (), Đỗ Tường Linh () and maura nguyễn donohue () will discuss the research and conversations that have led to the development of their upcoming projects, focusing on experimental performance art from Vietnam.

This program will kick off a broader series of events, including an editorial project with Movement Research () and a series of programs with Performance Space New York (.space.new.york)

For more information and RSVPs click the link in our bio!

Images courtesy of Thanh Bui (left) and maura nguyễn donohue (right)