een geschenk uit de (chinese) hemel

Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990  has four components:

1)	The first is an urgent drive to preserve and make accessible valuable material from the 1980s. AAA has been collecting periodicals, newspaper clippings, photographs, video recordings, exhibition catalogues, invitations, correspondence and other materials that relate to the development of contemporary art in China during this decade. It has acquired hundreds of texts published in the 1980s and digitized the personal archives of renowned artists and curators, resulting in a total of over 70,000 digital documents. Much of this material is available on-site at AAA’s library in Hong Kong, where all are welcome to visit.
2)	To complement existing material, AAA has conducted in-depth interviews with over 75 key individuals from the contemporary Chinese art world of the 1980s, including artists, critics and curators. Unedited versions of these interviews are accessible on-site at AAA in Hong Kong and selected excerpts online at the project’s website.
3)	AAA has used footage from 14 interviews to create a 50-minute documentary film about experimental art in South China (Guangdong) in the 1980s entitled From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng: Cantonese Contemporary Art in the 1980s. This special documentary captures the unique perspectives of many of those involved during this seminal time.
4)	And finally, the project culminates in a comprehensive bilingual (Chinese/English) website, which presents the most significant material gathered for the project. With its chronologies, bibliographies and links to other resources in the field, the website aims to become the most important publicly accessible resource for this creative period in Chinese art history.