The rise of Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive and the coming digitisation of its artefacts
As Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive turns 25, we talk to its executive director Özge Ersoy about managing the institution’s 150,000 plus artefacts
“Archive is a method,” Özge Ersoy says, sitting among the rooms full of bookshelves that now hold some 45,000 physical books, a far cry from the single shelf the Asia Art Archive started with 25 years ago.
In September, Ersoy became the Hong Kong non-profit’s new executive director, taking over from the artist Christopher K. Ho as the archive celebrates its silver jubilee.
The Turkey-born curator, researcher and educator is a familiar face in Hong Kong’s art scene, having been a full-time member of the AAA team since 2017, the year he arrived in the city.
The methods of archiving at the AAA have never just been about dusty records. With her track record in mobilising international networks for knowledge exchanges, such as co-curating “The Collective School” in 2023, Ersoy will continue to make AAA a platform that enables more people to research and record Asian art history and be inspired by it.
That includes people like the Beijing artist Song Dong, who returned recently for an “interactive artistic intervention” at the AAA library in his inimitable style.
That style is not so much his head-to-toe ensemble in canary yellow and beard that, he joked, makes him look like Takashi Murakami, but the way he stakes his personal memories in an archive as interventions.