Asia Art Archive (AAA)’s new exhibition, Countering Time, brings together new works by four international artists and writers—Lee Weng Choy, Simon Leung, Gala Porras-Kim, and Merve Ünsal—on the concept of archival time. The exhibition is open to the public at Asia Art Archive’s CCG Library from 27 September 2024 to 1 March 2025. A series of programmes, including a conversation with the artists, curator-led guided tours, talks, and workshops, will be available to the public free of charge.
Our daily lives are structured by measurements of time. Calendar systems track the passage of weeks, months, and years, while clocks divide days into hours, minutes, and seconds. Yet, time, as we experience it, resists precise measurement—it can slow down, stretch, accelerate, or even spiral. As an art archive, we are interested in this tension between precision and elusiveness. We often ask ourselves if historical events and art histories have definitive beginnings and endings. And how might artists counter strict chronologies?
Countering Time follows a collaborative working model and grows out of group discussions with four artists and writers over the course of six months. The exhibition presents new works that speculate on the immeasurability of time. Merve Ünsal uses her body to record a centuries-old sinkhole where human and geological time collapse. Simon Leung bends and folds the afterlives of a moment captured in a 1967 photograph from Hong Kong. Gala Porras-Kim traces recollections of lost works and archives. Lee Weng Choy uses personal annotations to mark time. Together, they tune in, refract, exhume, and annotate artworks, archival records, and past events, demonstrating how archives are sites of imagination instead of final resting places of historical records.
The exhibition also features selections of artists’ books and exhibition catalogues from AAA Collections with a focus on the fluidity of time. The artists’ books showcase different methods to reframe the process of archival documentation as subjective and non-linear. The exhibition catalogues introduce recurring themes in past exhibitions held in Hong Kong about time, including fictional narratives, interventions into historical sites, and more.
On 27 September from 7–8:30pm, a conversation with the artists and writers will be hosted at AAA’s CCG Library to mark the opening of the exhibition. The conversation invites Lee Weng Choy, Simon Leung, Gala Porras-Kim, and Merve Ünsal to discuss ideas of archival time, impermanence, ghosts, and artistic speculation. They speak about their own artworks as well as personal and shared references, including films and poems.
The new exhibition serves as the culminating showcase in AAA’s series of talks, performances, and exhibitions dedicated to examining the representation and perception of time in archives. Through this exhibition, we aim to propose new perspectives on archival time and demonstrate how artists push the boundaries and possibilities of art archives.