"If everyone has this realisation of what is lacking and uses their own talents to maximise themselves and do something about it, then I think our world will become fuller. ... When you have a vision, every step becomes a small step towards making it happen."—Susanna Chung

ORIGINS: LEARNING, CULTURE AND COMMUNITY

CNTRFLD. Looking back at your upbringing and early experiences, what first shaped your relationship to learning, culture and community?

SC. When I look at this question, I think about two aspects. One of the reasons why I initiated the Learning and Participation department at Asia Art Archive was because I saw what was lacking at that time.

I joined Asia Art Archive in 2005, which was its fifth anniversary — AAA started in 2000. At that time, there were only four people. I worked as a very junior staff member. I had studied art history and came to work here, but I had the chance to do all kinds of things: fundraising, programmes and assisting with different projects.

One of my major roles was assisting the directors with fundraising, which was good training because, as a young professional, you could do all kinds of work — from getting artwork and putting a catalogue together, to promotion and organising dinners. It was very much about supporting the directors.

Usually, as a young person, in your first year you learn; in your second year you start to understand how to do things; by your third year, you can do them well. So, I think it was around my third year, around 2008 or 2009, that I started to ask myself: What is the meaning of my work?

I think this is a question I have carried with me throughout my career: What is the meaning of my work? Who am I serving? Who can benefit? Am I duplicating somebody else's work? Who needs to know, and who will I offer the chance to know these things to?

At that time, I was very much influenced by my university experience. At university, I joined a community. I'm Catholic, so I joined a Christian community that talked about the “option for the poor”. The idea of “the poor” doesn't necessarily mean people who are financially poor or living in poverty. For me, I started asking: Who are the poor in my neighbourhood, in my surroundings? Then I started to think about who the “neighbours” or the “poor” were in contemporary art, or in the arts more broadly.

At that time, Asia Art Archive was very small. Unlike now, where you can see education, accessibility and programmes placed at the centre, when it started, the priority was really on forming the research and collection. Everything else came quite organically.

We had many researchers, curators, patrons, artists and, especially, art professionals coming to us. To me, these were “rich” people — some were rich financially, but some were rich in terms of knowledge. At least they knew what art was. They just needed more conversation and exchange.

But as someone who grew up in Hong Kong, even though I studied art history, in those few years at AAA I learned about contemporary art in Asia, from Asia. For a while, I had never learned art like this, even at university, which was very much focused on Western art or Chinese traditional art. I had no chance to learn about art that was closer to my life, closer to my geography, or closer to my time.

So those first few years at AAA were very important. On the one hand, I was working, but my exposure to contemporary art really started there.  That's why I started asking myself: Why did I never learn things like this in secondary school, or in my school life, whether primary, secondary or university?

Then I started to do research into this gap, and I proposed starting the Learning and Participation department. I began asking: How can an archive contribute to education? How can a resource centre for contemporary art contribute to education? That was the beginning.

There is another aspect of my practice today that I think goes back even further to my secondary school visual arts teacher. She was an artist, which was quite rare at that time. I'm talking about around 20 years ago. Now it's very common to have artists in schools and artist-educators, but at that time, having an artist who was still practising while working in a secondary school was quite different from having a teacher who simply taught art.

My teacher was one of the earliest female sculptors in Hong Kong, and she has since moved to America. She was my visual arts teacher from when I was around 14.

Usually, in the past, you would just make art — you did artmaking. But for her, even at that time, without any curriculum change like we have now, she asked us to do research.  For example, she might teach us Chinese calligraphy. If you copied a certain script, you could get certain marks, but if you researched that script, you could get an additional ten marks.

Similarly, I remember one year when it was around the time of the Olympics. She asked us to research the Olympics and then come back and draw things about muscles, the human body and so on through the Olympics, ethics and different ideas. I got really good results when I did research into these materials. I don't think I have that much talent in artmaking, but she was the first person in my life who let me know that even through making art, you can gain good results through research and working with ideas. That is the research aspect.

When I look at my work at Asia Art Archive now, we are not doing the artwork itself. We are carrying the story around the art, the story around the artwork, the story around the exhibition, or the contextual understanding of a place. In fact, that is very much linked with my learning and my interests at that time: the research aspect and understanding the context to understand what is happening. That shaped what I see and what kind of learning I provide today.

THE GAP THAT LED TO LEARNING AND PARTICIPATION

CNTRFLD. CNTRFLD.ART was partly founded from a similar sense that certain knowledge and resources were missing, particularly around contemporary art from East and Southeast Asian communities. You have described how your own exposure to contemporary Asian art only really began when you joined Asia Art Archive. Beyond that initial realisation, was there a particular moment when you understood that this gap could — and should — become part of your own practice?

SC. I have to say, it wasn't until I worked here that I was exposed to contemporary Asian art.  There were artists who came to give talks at that time, although it wasn't as well curated as it is now. But if we go back in time to around 2005 to 2009, Hong Kong didn't have that much of an offering of contemporary art.

Asia Art Archive was one of the few organisations. We also had Para Site, but their focus was very much on exhibition-making. In terms of places where knowledge preservation and sharing were a core part of the work, I think we were one of the only ones.

We didn't have a museum of contemporary art at that time. Now we have M+, which is a contemporary museum. We had a few museums run by the government, but they still did things in quite a traditional way. Maybe occasionally you could see one contemporary art exhibition, or they would bring an international exhibition of classical or famous Western art. Our exposure to art was therefore very much about the masters' artworks. You studied Picasso and so on.

It wasn't until I worked at Asia Art Archive that I really had this exposure. I remember at university we also had a course called Hong Kong Art Workshop. They brought us to different organisations to learn about different infrastructures, but we still weren't formally taught in this way.

So, I think exposure is important. When you experience what is present, you become aware of what was absent in the past. The timing is crucial.

AAA AS A LIVING ARCHIVE

CNTRFLD. That initial gap has since grown into more than two decades of work at AAA. What interests me about Asia Art Archive is that it has never felt like a static storehouse; it is active, evolving and deeply connected to the field. How do you understand AAA's mission today, and what does it mean in practice to make art and knowledge genuinely accessible?

SC. I have to say that AAA has also kept evolving over 25 years. It's not easy to suggest what we are doing now without looking at how we got here.

It wasn't easy to suggest education within an institution at that time. I came across difficulties when I first initiated it, but first, I had a very supportive Executive Director and founder, Claire Hsu. I think she also had this idea; otherwise, she wouldn't have started the organisation.

The idea was to provide access to contemporary art through the archive. For me, I just took one more step and thought: How can we take more initiative to bring these materials into education?

At least we need to let communities know that these artists are available and give them a chance to learn.  But if you just keep being here, only the people who come here will know. So how can we actively invite people to come, or make them learn about this?

The founder really supported me. I would just say that when AAA first started, we didn't have — it's unlike what people see now. People always say, “Oh, AAA now is very well thought through, AAA is so good.”

But this is a place that has been shaped by people who come and go as well. We didn't have a five-year, ten-year, 20-year or 25-year business plan. What you're seeing now isn't something we planned 25 years ago. We didn't even know how to do it.

AAA is doing it step by step because even the existence of Asia Art Archive itself had never happened before. A place that keeps materials by artists and art practitioners from Asia — no one was doing that.  So we are learning by doing. Then, at a certain stage, we change the way we work when we see duplication or when we realise something isn't working. We keep evolving and making changes so that we remain relevant.

I think it's similar with education.  When I first initiated the programme, there were researchers, and at that time even the researchers were mainly concerned with collecting, putting things on the shelf and preserving the archive. Of course, we had a library, but the communication between accessibility and opening the archive wasn't as strong as the emphasis on keeping and collecting.

But that may be a natural step. When you're opening a box, you should start filling it with something first before you can open it.  When I joined, that was the period when they were collecting. That's why even some board members or existing researchers and colleagues might ask, “Do we really need to take care of these kids?”

I remember that I self-initiated some visits for school, high-school and university students. They came, and even in a very humble way, we introduced what we did and showed them the books.  In one of the study visits, a colleague said to me, “Susanna, are you sure we need to take care of these kids?”  And I said yes.

Eventually, some of those colleagues left the organisation, but I kept driving and kept going.  I think sometimes, if someone wants to make change, it takes time. Whoever can stay longer may be able to make an impact.

If that is a true impact, then you can make the impact. When some people leave, you continue to tell the story and keep talking about it. Then new members come and they feel that this is the core. When more people come, they see it as more and more of a core value.  They also come in with new eyes and see the need.  So, it takes time to become impactful, and you also must go through some hurdles.

If you look back at AAA's mission statement, perhaps in the past AAA was a resource centre, a library, or a centre for keeping contemporary art history. But now we put knowledge preservation and knowledge sharing almost equally. That means both preserving through research and library collections and sharing. And sharing is not only through education. We have expanded into exhibitions, public programmes, professional programmes and editorial work, including writing.

So, my idea of sharing has also expanded. It started with my own thoughts, but other people can think about sharing in different ways.  I feel very happy to have been there at that moment, to emphasise this and see how different people come in and shape it differently.

This is how AAA evolved — basically, it has evolved through the people who come in and move on.

SCHOOL OF SCHOOLS

CNTRFLD. In our previous conversation, you mentioned your vision of a “school of schools”, which feels like a natural extension of this idea of learning through networks and communities. Could you unpack that philosophy a little further? What can alternative learning spaces offer that more formal or traditional educational structures sometimes cannot?

SC. The school of schools is my ambition for the near future. When we first started our education work, we focused on youth programmes and community projects. As Hong Kong gained other cultural institutions, such as M+ and Tai Kwun, with greater public resources to reach wider communities, we changed our approach. In 2017, we made a strategic shift to put educators at the core of our work.

I began to ask what it means to work with educators as our audience. This includes not only schoolteachers, but artist-educators, artists running alternative education projects, emerging teachers and retired teachers. Over time, I realised that this is a very wide community, with people at different stages of their careers and different kinds of experience.

As a small non-profit organisation, with a team of only two or three people, we must work with communities to do more. Our programmes are not just programmes; they are also ways of building communities. In our youth programmes, for example, young people return to contribute to the learning of others. I began to think about how we could apply the same approach to educators, bringing different groups together so that they could become resources for one another.

In Hong Kong, this means bridging generational and experiential gaps. Someone who is just one year older than you might have something valuable to teach you. We rarely have spaces where emerging and experienced teachers can learn alongside one another, sharing knowledge as peers.

We have already begun practising this through our summer studio for teachers with one to six years of teaching experience. Many experienced teachers have left Hong Kong, leaving young visual arts teachers with little senior support. We bring together artists, peers and experienced teachers from other schools as mentors, creating a community where emerging teachers can exchange ideas, explore what they might contribute and realise they are not working alone. Each teacher comes from a different school, with different methodologies. If AAA can act as a space where these approaches connect and are shared, that is already a kind of school-of-schools model.

I am also thinking about this on a regional scale. Through projects such as our Mobile Library, which began in Vietnam in 2011 before expanding to other places, I have developed relationships with people working in contexts where contemporary art education is still lacking. Many artists have responded by creating alternative learning platforms and organisations. I know these different people and practices, but they do not necessarily know one another. How can I bring these different nodes together?

As I approached my 20th anniversary at AAA, I began to think about the legacy I would like to leave. Some organisations or practices stop when a particular person leaves. After all this effort, how can the resources and networks we have built continue beyond my own involvement? I want to create a school of schools that brings alternative schools and practices together, allowing people with different levels of experience to learn from one another and develop collaborations that can continue without us.

This is also connected to AAA's value of generosity. How can I not keep treating relationships as mine? How can I share those relationships with others?

I am still looking for the right resources and opportunities to make this happen. Meeting face to face is important for building relationships, so the school of schools could take different forms: a conference, camp, symposium or training session. I want to offer it as a possibility whenever we find an opportunity to connect people working in different regions.

For example, in November, we will hold an archiving symposium in Hangzhou, China. I hope to use that opportunity to identify practitioners in the region who are working in similar ways, bring them together and help them get to know one another.

I am looking for companions and resources to make this vision happen, but I think it is important to have a vision in the first place. Even if I cannot achieve everything at once, I can start. When you have a vision, every step becomes a small step towards making it happen.

NETWORKS, TRUST AND SUSTAINABILITY

CNTRFLD. What you're describing also suggests that decentralised cultural work depends on something less tangible than formal infrastructure: trust, generosity, friendship and long-term relationships. How do you build networks in a way that allows them to continue beyond individual projects, funding cycles or institutional structures?  Additionally, funding is often project-based, while meaningful educational and community work takes much longer to develop. How have you navigated that tension at AAA?

SC. There are two things to respond to this question. First, in terms of funding, we are relatively lucky because, over 25 years, it takes time to build trust with funders.

Our work also builds trust with our supporters. Especially our current education supporter, The S.H. Ho Foundation— they really trust us. I think they even said that the report and whatever we give them is the best one they have received. I think the question is: How do we not only treat reporting as reporting, but as sharing?

I often provide more than they need, because I really hope my funder understands what I do. So, in fact, I see the relationship between funder and recipient — sponsor and recipient — almost as a partnership.

First of all, we need to find a funder who shares our mission. Our funder believes that education is the key. Then I also provide a niche service that is lacking, filling a gap in what is missing. I think I should keep thinking about what I'm doing and ensure that what I'm doing is unique and important.

Over time, the funder will know and trust that this person or organisation is providing something professional and needed. So how can we think about the relationship with the funder not only as funding, but almost as a partnership? Especially for foundations, their goal is to donate money. They have a certain mission, and part of their role is to find the right projects to support. So how can I get to know them enough and show them how our work matches their interests, without changing the way I want to do things? That's number one.

But the second thing is that I also don't think we should do every project every year.

Sometimes an opportunity comes along. Now is a good example because this is AAA’s 25th anniversary. As a team, going beyond my own department, we thought about how we would like to celebrate 25 years.

We all agreed that we didn't want to glorify ourselves and say how good we are. If that wasn't the way, then what could we do? We came up with the theme “Archive for All.” So, what does Archive for All mean?

For the Research and Curatorial team, they did the exhibition, At 25. They asked important and well-known artists today to show what they kept from their own 25th years old

But for me, in Learning & Participation, I thought: As an organisation with 25 years of experience, how can we translate our experience of archiving into something useful for artists and independent art initiatives? That's why we created an Archiving Handbook and Archiving Workshops. (e-flux)

But this wasn't something I already knew how to do. I just knew we should do it. We didn't know exactly how. So, we received funding, and that was for one year. We thought: If I have one year of funding, how can I maximise it?

So, we created a prototype — the first version of the handbook. My colleagues worked with an archivist, and the archivist gave them knowledge and materials. They translated this into a beta version of the Archiving Handbook.

Then we used this handbook to go to different places in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Asia to run Archiving Workshops. Every time we went somewhere, we learned what worked and what didn't work. We allowed things not to work, but we learned from them. The next time, we did the workshop differently. We learned what artists needed. We realised, “Oh, they need this,” so we added more things to the workshop. Eventually, through the more recent workshops, we knew how to do it.

Then we realised that there were things missing from the existing handbook. Because AAA has 25 years of history, we were initially focusing mainly on archiving physical materials. But the artists we were working with included younger artists working with digital-born materials, and the existing handbook didn't cover that. So, when we wrote the final version, we used all these workshops as research and as a way of shaping the handbook. Now the final handbook is online. We almost did the research through the workshops, rather than thinking authoritatively, “This is what is correct.”

That is perhaps one of the benefits of being a medium-sized organisation. We are not as big as a large museum, where they may need to plan for three to five years. They need to ensure that their work is going to happen. For very small organisations, I see that they may only have one year of funding, so they can't really think as far ahead. But we're somewhere in between. Even when we get government funding, perhaps it's for three years, and we also have some endowment or reserves. This helps.

So, when I work, sometimes I work on things that I'm really sure about — like the school programmes we've been doing for 15 years, or the internship and educators' programmes. But every time something starts, it goes through a testing stage. Just like the Archiving Handbook and Archiving Workshops, it took almost a year and a half until we reached the point where we knew how to do it. Then we published it, and it became something we could continue to move forward. I think this is the way we work: again, learning by doing and continually modifying.

I do things on a small scale. Even the cost can be small. Even without a budget, you can do something very small. You can test whether a certain way of working works. You can also test a partnership. When I work with an organisation, I always start with small projects. The project might cost us very little — perhaps no budget, a very small budget, or just an artist fee, which is very affordable. We get to know each other. Then we know whether the organisations really match before we work on something bigger. So, I think this is how I see budget, funding and opportunity as well.