Claire Hsu, Executive Director of Asia Art Archive
Co-founder and executive director of the Asia Art Archive, Claire Hsu is a driving force behind the contemporary arts scene in Hong Kong. Since establishing the AAA in 2000 at the age of 24, she’s worked on the M+ Museum project in West Kowloon and consulted on the redevelopment of the Central Police Station. She tells Andrea Lo about challenging perceptions, making art matter, and juggling work and motherhood.
I’m half-Austrian, half-Chinese. I was born in London and moved here when I was 10.
In my gap year, I went to Beijing and Vienna to try and find my roots. I’m still looking!
The arts offered me a space and an outlet to really understand the world, in a very different way than how I’d been taught it.
Every time I came across an artwork that I found interesting, there was definitely a calling there: “I need to do something in this field.”
With the Asia Art Archive, I wanted to create a space where other people could get as excited as I was with what was happening in the contemporary arts scene. One of the frustrations was that there wasn’t systematic documentation of the major developments happening in the field.
It’s philosophically about creating a space, where the knowledge around art is democratized and in the public domain.