This autumn, the Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong and New York's Museum of Modern Art will join forces to offer two large-scale surveys of the ephemera of Chinese Contemporary art: "Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990" and "Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents." Through recordings, collected texts, and translations of important theoretical tracts, these projects bring together an arsenal of materials that illuminate the rapid growth and development of Chinese Contemporary art over the past 30 years.
The AAA has taken the 1980s as their focus in "Materials of the Future," exploring in depth a decade of immense significance in China's recent history. In order to do this, the Archive set up a four-year research program focused specifically on the aggregation, organization and preservation of relevant materials. These primary and documentary source materials have been compiled into over a hundred volumes. In addition, the AAA conducted 75 video interviews and scanned rare documents and books in the collections of a number of leading Chinese artists and curators (including Fei Dawei, Zhang Xiaogang, Zheng Shengtian, Lv Peng, Mao Xuhui and Wu Shanzhuan), and produced a documentary film.

The Archive now has in its possession over 70,000 digital files, the world's most comprehensive and systematic compilation of materials relating to Chinese contemporary art from the 1980s. Beginning this September, the AAA's holdings will be open to the public, free of charge. People will be able to visit the Archive office in Hong Kong for consultations, and to browse the Chinese-English language Web site that was launched in an effort to make the materials globally accessible.

MoMA's contemporaneous publication of "Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents," will offer access to artistic records from 1976 through 2006. The material has been gathered from Chinese avant-garde collectives and includes their manifestos, prefaces to seminal exhibitions, writings of influential artists, important essays of art criticism, and other key primary source documentation, along with English translations, allowing readers to systematically follow the development of the Chinese avant-garde over the past 30 years.

Wu Hung, University of Chicago professor, director of the Center for the Art of East Asia, and consulting curator at the Smart Museum of Art, is the editor of the volume, which is being published by the MoMA together with Duke University Press. Starting September 7th, a series of media conferences on the two projects will take place across China, with important artists, critics, curators, and other art-world figures in attendance. These will take place at the Hong Kong Art Center (Sept. 7), the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing (Sept. 9), a venue yet to be announced in Shanghai (Sept. 10), and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Oct. 15).