First, a note about the title. The Sea of Learning is Infinite (學海無涯) is a Chinese proverb and also a title that I used in a 2017 presentation at the Times Museum in Guangzhou. At the time my former Asia Art Archive colleagues and I had been working on the archive of the late Hong Kong artist Ha Bik Chuen for three years. But more importantly, we were a year into running a project space dedicated to processing, digitizing, and activating Ha’s archive. At that time, as my colleagues and I had the time and physical space to literally unpack Ha’s archive and to look at what was actually in it. We were struck by how diverse the materials he collected that we had anticipated. This made me interested in thinking about the archive as a tool of self-teaching for Ha, who was an artist who did not receive any academic training but had a huge appetite for art and visuality at large. At the same time, as a team, we were faced with a collection of material that we would only get to know by working with it. This meant that we were also very often in the dark and teaching ourselves to handle all sorts of unknowns. I am curious about what effect a project like woking on Ha’s archive could have on us, and at the same time, I am invested in making this deep dive into one individual’s creative life transformative to our own intellectual and creative lives. I will share with you parts of the processes that we went through to transform Ha’s archive, as well as some reflections on my years of working with it.

Who was Ha Bik Chuen?

Ha Bik Chuen was born in 1925, in Xinhui, Guangdong. He came to Hong Kong via Macau in the 1950s and ran a family style paper flower making business before becoming an artist in the 1960s. One of the earliest images I encountered of Ha is this one—a contact sheet of photographs taken in the 1976 Urban Council Awards Winner Exhibition. This contact sheet was scanned and stored on AAA’s files so I have not encountered the actual contact sheet itself. But I was hooked on this contact sheet because of the rich visual information it contains. By looking at it closely I was able to know a lot about Ha—that he was a printmaker and sculptor someone who worked with materials such as bamboo. He who had the financial means and connections to hire a professional photographer, he who was willing and eager to pose for photographs, as well as he probably had an opinion about how photographs are to be developed.

When Ha passed away in 2009, the archive he left behind would include 50 years’ worth of exhibition documentation and ephemera, including photographs of over 2,500 exhibitions that he took inside and outside of Hong Kong. He amassed a personal library of over 5,000 books on art and other subjects. He also meticulously clipped and organized hundreds of thematically labeled boxes of magazines and newspaper cut-outs. Ha also used some of these cut-outs to construct over 300 book collages that he never showed publicly during his lifetime.

Mapping and moving Ha’s archive

When the Ha family reached out to AAA to work on Ha’s collection of materials in 2014, one of the first things we did as a team was to make sense of the materials spatially in Ha’s studio. This involved mapping Ha’s studio or archive space, which was in the old district in To Kwa Wan, into various zones, labeling them and describing them. Ha’s studio became the space where my colleagues and I worked for hours and days, deciphering the system of how Ha stored his materials, describing what the materials are so we have a blueprint of how to process them, selecting what mattered to us at that time and changing our minds afterward. During that time, we also spent the summer scanning at Spring Workshop in Hong Kong. For me, this photograph of Ha’s studio is about accumulation, about time spent in a space and the feelings that come with that time and the people who were around with us. And that projects and things take on other lives that you may or may not intend.

The condition of Ha’s studio took a sharp turn downwards in 2016 when parts of the ceiling began to fall due to water seepage. It was during this time that AAA made the critical institutional decision to start a larger project around Ha’s archive, which involved moving it and running a dedicated space to process it. We were able to raise funds to run a space for three years. And so in 2016 Summer, many of us at AAA mobilized to pack Ha’s archive so it could be moved down nine flights of stairs, and take a truck ride to Fotan to AAA’s project space. Any of us who have moved house before knows that packing and moving is a stressful matter, and with Ha’s stuff we also needed to keep track of what came from where. The fact that Ha’s studio was packed from floor to ceiling also pushed us to approach relocating the materials as an architectural problem. The zones that we began demarcating earlier on became part of the solution as an actual moving label, where different team members would log what was packed where by whom. Thinking about it now, I am not only grateful for our architects Sarah Lee and Yutaka Yano for their creativity, but also for their attentiveness. These labels, even though they are no longer as we repacked everything over the next few years, allowed us to trace up to a certain extent, our very physical, and at times sentimental, engagement with Ha’s materials and the space that they once inhabited.

One thing that I realized over the years of working with Ha’s materials—as it transformed from at times unruly materials that submit themselves to no institutional agenda, into disciplined folders and boxes and inventories and records—is that this stuff belonged to someone else before any of this. And for the family of Ha, this stuff would always have belonged to a family member, a husband, a father. And in that sense, the grieving never stops. And for those of us who chose to be involved with this project, we too, are choosing to become part of this process. Sometimes we might find ourselves mourning for the loss of the original studio space, the original status of the materials which was almost like an art installation. What hits me almost immediately afterward is what a privilege it is for us to be let into this physical and conceptual space, where we get to not only uncover materials that are integral to the writing of art history in Hong Kong and beyond. But also be reminded that any production of knowledge can also be a process saturated with affect that can transform us for the better if we choose to.

Organizing, listing, digitizing, researching

I remember one of the questions that got asked most when I was working on the Ha Archive at AAA was “how do you select what to digitize?” And my answer is usually “well, through A LOT OF discussion and debate. And before that, EVEN MORE discussion and debate about repacking and reorganizing the materials, and ACTUALLY reorganizing and repacking the materials.” Which is to say, working in an archive, handling archival materials is mostly a very mundane, repetitive, and boring job. But the materials encountered during this mundane process were things that could spark something in their handlers if they are open to and aware of these possibilities. This was one of the reasons that throughout the five years we ran the Fotan Project Space, my colleagues and I consciously built a team where everyone either has a practice, or is in search of one. Much attention is also paid to building tools that could be transferred to and used by different people seamlessly. The team has to function if one of us calls in sick, travels, or even quits. We all had to know how to do each other’s jobs. And most importantly, our tenure of working with Ha’s archive has to be a space and time where we are not only given permission to, but encouraged to, pursue personal growth. Each team member’s curiosity as well as those collaborate with AAA also opened up the research that we did as we as covered more Ha’s materials this sometimes overturned our existing assumptions.

For example, Walid Raad, discovering Ha’s collages, completely changed the way we approached Ha’s archive. The pages may look weirdly seamless, but in fact, Ha had cut and pasted images from different sources onto the page, and these artist books—over 300 of them—were hiding in plain sight when we worked in Ha’s original studio. This discovery made us aware that Ha’s archive is not just about exhibition history, but also about what happens when an artist makes archiving part of his/her creative practice, the archive must go over to beyond straightforward documentation and linear history. The archive has to be a creative space, and in this case, pages become walls, and walls become pages.

I myself am intrigued by Ha’s travel photography and his shape-shifting collage photography. These materials, being lesser known aspects of what Ha’s photography has fueled my interest in how art and images circulate. They also feed my interest in looking into why some things get dropped from dominant narratives, or why certain things stick, and what happens if we restage certain scenarios.

Activating and advocating

One of the most rewarding and inspiring activities we did parallel to organizing Ha’s materials was to open the archive up for use and teaching. This meant that we had university students from studio art, art history, even architecture departments in various universities in Hong Kong, and they have classes inside our project space. In some cases, like the Hong Kong Art Workshop taught by The University of Hong Kong, students use Ha’s to conduct their own primary research on Hong Kong’s art history. We also held residencies with artists and curators who would open up inquiries that we may not be aware of, or not be able to address because we do not have that level of knowledge and understanding. Part of the mission of running the Project Space was also to identify multiple homes for Ha’s materials, because it is impossible for one single institution to take permanent care of the archive due to its volume. So Ha’s archive now lives in three different places: part of it with AAA, part of it with the University of Hong Kong, and part of it with M+.

As my last project at AAA I curated an exhibition departing from Ha’s archive at Tai Kwun Contemporary, which took place in spring and summer of 2021. Titled Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys, the exhibition considered how an archive can become a creative site. The affect of both Ha’s original studio, as well as the continuous unfolding process that defined Fotan Project Space was something that stayed with myself and also other artists. Curatorially this spatial and temporal affect became something that was interesting to explore. This translated into a theatrical attitude within the exhibition, where the exhibition then became ten “sets” that the visiting public would enter and complete.

Often exhibitions departing from archives are heavily reliant on illustrative displays of information but I like to imagine Portals as having different temperatures. I was keen on expressing an affect of a space that is physically no longer but is still existing in a different way—intimate, time frozen, but also pregnant with possibilities. Portals was also about long-term conversations with artists, how artists and other practitioners alike bring in new perspectives and observations that we may not be able to see because we were so blindsided. Even with the same archive, same artists, there are always unknowns to be discovered and encountered together. An archive, especially when you open it to artist’s intervention, is never fully known. The questions remain: What is an archive? How do we engage with it such that we do not foreclose processes of making meaning, and meaning itself?

In 2016 I mentioned this in one of the earliest presentations I did on Ha and the experience of working on his archive. I said “There are artists who will feed you, there are artists who will choke you (because they smoke around you), and then there are artists who will haunt you. I think Ha is one who will haunt, and I think the hauntings will be multiple.” At that time, I thought about the hauntings as multiple because it will be haunting more people than myself, which is true. But now I’ve also realized that hauntings are also with myself, and they too have been multiple. And as much as Ha as a figure haunts me, I perhaps, am haunting him too. I just don’t seem to leave him alone, and keep returning to his archive and practice, and through that try to make sense of the changing sense of scale, of ourselves, and of history.

Over the years of working with and speaking about Ha’s archive, there are a few metaphors that have stuck, that I still return to quite regularly. That to work with and within the archive is:

To navigate a maze/complex labyrinth that you don’t fully know yet
To build a compass while already at sea
To draw a map without a birds eye view
To play a piece of music while writing a score for it

It has been at least four years since I first spoke about the process of working with Ha’s archive in these words, and I am still working with it in a different way, but these metaphors still make sense and move me in a certain way; Things have of course changed and the world is a very different one now. The reading of these materials, the maps and scores that my friends and I made years ago in order to make sense—their intentions, desires, affects, and what they actually do and how they do it—are still unfolding itineraries of a journey. This is not necessarily a journey to art historical truth, or the truth of the archive, although there would be moments of clarity where one sees in sharp focus what these entities and disciplines can be and can do at its best. And my hopes are still the same as when I first started out with Ha’s archive, that we don’t flatten things or get flattened in the process, that we still get fed back into our pasts, presents, and futures, and we don’t ever do this alone.

—
This revised text is based on Michelle Wun Ting Wong’s presentation titled ‘The Sea of Learning is Infinite (ver. 2),’ held on Day 2 of Public Meetings―Shift in Learning (January 16, 2022) as a part of SeMA Learning Station: Shift at Seoul Museum of Art.

Korean translation of the text: 미셸 웡, 「배움의 바다는 무한하다(ver. 2)」