The research component for my project, Mediating the Mekong, is drawing to an end. Last week I presented the Asia Art Archive with the materials collected over the past year from artists, curators and organizations throughout the sub-mekong region. There was over 20 GB of media (video, images, etc).

I also gave a presentation at the archive, which in retrospect might have focused more on Media Art in the Mekong (as opposed to Media) as there were several in attendance studying and teaching media art in some of several institutions in Hong Kong. Rather, I gave an overview of some of the activities and socioeconomic and political conditions and their relation to the developing contemporary art scene. I will make a particular effort to include more media art into the final report due in the end of July.

The Asia Art Archive is impressive and one of the spaces in Asia that I've been hoping to visit for years. It is an amazing an rigorous effort providing information about Asian Arts worldwide to scholars, researchers and artists. I hope that Vietnam, like Thailand, can one day begin it's own archive.

It was also by pure coincidence that Claire (Executive Director of AAA) and I were speaking about Ou Ning who runs the Alternative Archive in China one afternoon. That day, he happened to be in Hong Kong and we were able to meet. Small, small world

During my short stay in Hong Kong, I was able to see several of the arts spaces including the new Osage Gallery (above). The Gallery is amazing in its own right but the amazing thing is that the gallery is one of many projects of the Osage company which produces apparel for companies such as Anthropologie. In so many ways, this runs parallel with my own life: working during the day for NTU, a contemporary fashion design company in Ho Chi Minh City balanced with the arts activities during the other times. I handed to my design class at RMIT this evening an article called "Kissing Cousins" by designer Rick Poyner on the intersections between art and design. I always recall what Teiji Furuhashi (founder of the Kyoto-based performance art group Dumb Type) wrote in Memorandum before his early death about the struggle between a commercial day-life and an artistic night life. The sculptural installations above are from a Chinese artist and made from real animal bones. It took several cows to assemble the piece above.