Archiving Archiving: Scoping
Archive of contemporary graphic design ephemera at the old premises of Book Society, Seoul.
View of the archive room at Malaysia Design Archive
Audience at Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam where astra* presented their work about design archives in East and Southeast Asia
Archival image of object in Hong Kong Modernism archive
“Archiving Archiving” is an umbrella research project that explores archival cultures of design across East and Southeast Asia (ESEA). Adopting a transnational lens, the initiative has involved scoping, examining, and exchanging with independent and informal design archives across ESEA since 2021. Our constellation of existing collaborators include: Malaysia Design Archive, Singapore Graphic Archives, The Book Society, and Hong Kong Design History Network.
“Archiving Archiving” is an umbrella research project that explores archival cultures of design across East and Southeast Asia (ESEA). Adopting a transnational lens, the initiative has involved scoping, examining, and exchanging with independent and informal design archives across ESEA since 2021. Our constellation of existing collaborators include: Malaysia Design Archive, Singapore Graphic Archives, The Book Society, and Hong Kong Design History Network.
Our chapbook, titled Scoping, will be the first published outcome of “Archiving Archiving”. This experimental publication will spotlight the Hong Kong and Greater Bay contexts, inviting contributions from peers working in (or with) local and regional design archives. This content will be complemented by work commissioned from our current collaborators in ESEA. Contributors will reflect on key concepts, such as the politics and poetics of representation, embodied practices, climate and preservation, and even experiencing and feeling the archive.
- 2024
- Grantee: Zara Arshad and Vivien Chan
Zara Arshad (she/her) is a researcher and curator interested in twentieth- and twenty first-century material and visual culture, liminal spaces, speculative histories, and design futures. She has previously held roles at: Asia Culture Center in South Korea, Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Design History Society UK, Beijing Design Week, and Icograda World Design Congress Beijing. Currently, Arshad is a doctoral researcher based at the V&A and University of Brighton (UoB); a university lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London College of Fashion, Royal College of Art, and UoB; a Governing Board Member of 爻 yáo collaborative (formerly China Residencies); and co-founder of the research constellation astra* with design historian Vivien Chan.
Vivien Chan (she/they) is a design historian, educator and image maker based in the UK, specialising in East and Southeast Asia. She completed her PhD in 2024, which focused on consumption spaces in twentieth-century Hong Kong through the lens of spatial history and material culture. Chan is a co-founder of two design research collectives: Hong Kong Design History Network, an independent collective researching design and material culture in and of Hong Kong; and astra*, an experimental research constellation with Zara Arshad. Her research interests extend to the body and sensory experience, the everyday and experimental research methodologies, including grassroots archives, drawing practices and self-publishing. She lectures in Illustration and Design Research at Nottingham Trent University and is currently an Editorial Fellow for History Workshop.