Please note that applications are now closed. Sign up for our newsletter to receive information about future application cycles. Thank you!

First Seminar Date: Saturday, August 17, 2024 at 10:30am – 1pm. Subsequent meetings in October 2024, December 2024, and February 2025. Please note that this is an in-person only opportunity.

Asia Art Archive in America is thrilled to announce the open call of the 6th iteration of Leadership Camp. Initiated in 2016 by Christopher K. Ho, artist, teacher and current Executive Director of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, this long-standing program brings together arts practitioners at varying stages of their careers to discuss through an “Asian” lens a wide range of topics impacting art, art practice and the arts profession. This Camper-led program encourages discussion, debate, and knowledge sharing and begins with an overarching theme, an initial set of “framing questions,” and a reading list. Different for each Camp and proposed by the Camp leaders themselves, the program’s themes have included: “Envisioning Institutions,” “Engendering Leadership,” “Model Minorities and Model Majorities,” “Other Racisms,” and “(Im)material Ruins.” Expanding on these themes, some initial questions have asked: Might once marginal spaces now constitute institutional instruments for change? How can Asian social structures….inform models of contemporary leadership, and how might artists, curators, gallerists, and scholars in Asia and elsewhere productively and selectively deploy these? With Asia constituting 60 percent of the world’s population….are there best practices for being a global model majority and a US minority alike? What if the “other” in “Other Racisms” is replaced with “our”?

Leadership Camp combines closed seminar-type discussions of selected texts with presentations by participants and guests which culminate in a final project or program. In 2022 and 2023 participants collectively explored ruin culture, memorialization, and representation, as well as the artistic and curatorial responses prompted by the history and site of the archive. Their final project developed into an exhibition.

This year’s Leadership Camp’s theme, “Vaguely Asian,” has been proposed by Simon Wu and Daniel Chew who will organize and moderate the sessions, with the support of AAAinA’s programming team, including Claire Kim and Ying-Chiun Lee. Exploring an expansive idea of Asian and Asian American identity and solidarity through the “Vaguely Asian,” Wu and Chew’s initial framing questions for the first session can be accessed HERE.

Applications for Leadership Camp: “Vaguely Asian” are due on Friday, July 5, at 11:59PM. Applications should be sent to ylee@aaa-a.org. Please send all the below elements in ONE PDF FILE:

• a CV
• a narrative bio (max. 200 words)
• a short statement detailing your interest in Leadership Camp and this year’s theme of “Vaguely Asian.” Please refer to the Framing Questions, linked above, for more context on this year’s theme. (max. 500 words)
• an artwork or writing sample (optional)

Prior to the first session on Saturday, August 17, 10:30am – 1pm at Asia Art Archive in America, 23 Cranberry Street, Brooklyn NY 11201, participants will receive PDFs of the readings we will use as points of departure by email.

Leaders’ Bios:

Simon Wu is a curator and writer involved in collaborative art production and research. He has organized exhibitions and programs at the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, MoMA, and David Zwirner, among other venues. In 2021 he was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant and was featured in Cultured magazine’s Young Curators series. He was a 2018 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and is currently in the PhD program in History of Art at Yale University. His first book, Dancing On My Own, is out with Harper in June 2024. He has two brothers, Nick and Duke, and loves the ocean.

Daniel Chew is a filmmaker and artist who is based in New York. He works collaboratively with Micaela Durand in film and with the collective CFGNY in art. Working in collaboration is very important to his practice and is an intentional political decision that models an alternate way of existing in a world that obsesses over the cult of the individual. He has shown work at International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Hammer Museum, Cooper Hewitt, MoMA PS1, MOCA LA, e-flux, Japan Society, Auto Italia London, and The Shed among many other venues. A trilogy of short films he co-directed with Micaela Durand is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. He has done residencies at Macdowell, Fogo Island Arts, BiljmAIR Amsterdam and has held fellowships with Jerome Foundation, Queer Art, and Asia Art Archive in America.

2024 Leadership Camp Participants:

Anna Ting Möller is an artist living and working in New York City and Stockholm. Möller received an MFA from Columbia University, New York and a BFA from Konstfack University, Stockholm, SE. Möller’s work has been exhibited at Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm, SE; ArkDes, SE; Carl Eldh, SE; ICPNA La Molina, PE; Luan Gallery, CH; Jyväskylä Art Museum, FI; Titanik, FI, Supper Club Fair, Hongkong, HK; Gallery Tutu, US; Island Gallery, US; Murmurs, US; Urban Glass, US; Alexander Berggruen, US; Phillips New York, US and Ceysson & Bénétière, US. They participated in the 45th Tendencies Biennale in Norway and The Immigrant Artist Biennale in New York. Möller has received residencies and fellowships from EFA Robert Blackburn, US; Kronobergs Kulturpris, SE; The Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program, US; Asia Art Archive in America, US; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), US; The Here and There Co (THAT Co), US; Film Regionerna Sydost, SE; The Sweden-America Foundation, SE; Bengt Juhlin Foundation, SE. The artist’s work has been reviewed in publications such Hyperallergic and Brooklyn Rail. Konstenet, OmKonst, Paletten, DN Kultur, C-print, BON; amongst others.

Christina Yang is an independent curator, scholar, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn (NY) and Williamstown (MA). A global contemporary art, performance and archives specialist, her interdisciplinary work focuses on spectatorship, politics of the image and feminist care. She has filled curatorial roles at the Berkeley Art Museum + Pacific Film Archive, Williams College Museum of Art, The Kitchen, Guggenheim and Queens Museums. Her curatorial range includes new media, performance commissions, artist residencies, public engagement, and social practice. She contributes frequently to New Social Environment/The Brooklyn Rail and her essay Hung Liu: Seeing and Unknowing appeared in May 2024 (RYANLEE). She served as performance reviews editor at Women +Performance, a journal of feminist theory (2018-20) as well as on their editorial board (2015-20). In fall 2024, she is teaching in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). She delights in being a mentor to an emerging generation of practitioners focusing on artists and curators of color. She holds an MA (Williams College) and BA (University of California, Berkeley) in art history. Her Ph.D. dissertation Performance and The Gaze: Spectatorship in The Kitchen Archive, 1974-84 is forthcoming from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (fall 2024).

Emma Ike is an arts administrator and educator passionate about community engagement and promoting access, equity, and cultural citizenship in museums. As Manager of Education at The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, she embraces anti-bias values and diverse models of co-creation to collaboratively organize education and public programs serving access, adult, community, family, school, and teen audiences. Notable projects have focused on uplifting local Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander artists and communities, including commemorative Day of Remembrance programs and Community Days in connection to the Museum’s Open Call for Artist Banners.

Previously, Emma held education programming roles at the Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Hall, Children’s Museum of the Arts, Rubin Museum of Art, Studio Institute, and Venice Biennale. She earned a BS in Art History and Museum Professions with a minor in Asian Studies and an AS in Fine Arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology. In 2021, she was selected to participate in The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Museum Education Practicum and is currently in the New York Foundation for the Arts’ 2024 Emerging Leaders Program.

Eugenie Tsai is a curator and writer based in New York. From 2007 – 2023, she was the John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, at the Brooklyn Museum where she oversaw the Contemporary collection, and organized loan and collection exhibitions. Exhibitions she organized include “Oscar yi Hou: East of Sun, West of Moon” (2022-23), “Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven” (2022), “The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time” (2021-2022) and KAWS: WHAT PARTY” (2021). She also curated “Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic” (2015), co-curated “Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed Stuy and Beyond“ (2014), and Toya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital” (2013).

Prior to joining the Brooklyn Museum, she organized “Robert Smithson,” (2004), which debuted at MOCA LA, before going on to the Dallas Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (the exhibition received the International Art Critics first place award for best monographic show of 2005, and “Robert Smithson Unearthed” (1999) at the Wallach Art Center, Columbia University. Eugenie worked at MoMA/PS1 as Director of Curatorial Affairs (2006-2007), and at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1994-2000) in various curatorial positions.

Jayne Cole Southard is a contemporary art historian and curator. Her research focuses on contemporary Asian and Asian American art in New York City. Her work on these topics has been supported by organizations including the Henry Luce Foundation and the Association for the Historians of American Art. Her related writings have appeared in publications including Art Journal and Panorama: The Journal of the Association of American Art. Additionally, Cole Southard has a wide-range of curatorial, museum, and gallery experience. She held positions at the Shanghai Museum and the Walker Art Center, among other venues. She recently co-curated Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City (19769- 2001) at NYU’s 80WSE. Cole Southard holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Oregon. She is currently a Lecturer in the Art Department at the City College of New York.

Hailing from the Bay Area, Jennifer Li (she/her) holds a Master of Architecture II (2023) from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Architecture (2019) from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. She serves as critic at Cal Poly, Boston Architectural College, NYIT, and Parsons New School when requested; Design Associate at Alloy Development, a development firm run by architects who build only in Brooklyn under the pillars of beauty, sustainability, and equity; and writes occasionally. With contributing works featured in Pairs GSD (2023) and e-Flux journal (2024), Li is also one of sixteen Emerging Leaders at the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (2024). Her studies accumulate on the basis of collaboration and inquisition, where she has had the great liberty of creating and moderating panels, internationally televised forums, and coordinating exhibition work; inviting a number of architects, artists, activists, and theorists in discussion and exhibition as Chair for a number of organizations: Womxn in Design, National Organization of Minority Architects, and APIA at Harvard GSD. Jen is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, where she has an issue with (or a gift of) safekeeping paper memorabilia, and is on the hunt (ongoing) for the best Taiwanese flies’ head in town.

Johann Yamin (he/they) is an artist, art worker, and educator. His current research and writing focus on digital cultures from the contexts of Singapore and its broader region of Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on the materiality of communication infrastructures and their entanglements with colonial histories. Responding to the technopolitics of virtual worlds, his practice has taken shape through text-based videogames, moving image installations, curatorial work, and varied forms of support. He was a 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow at Eyebeam, New York for co-organising the online project Pulau Something, and a Curatorial & Research Resident at the Singapore Art Museum in 2021. He was awarded a Rhizome Microgrant in 2023. He is currently a PhD student at NYU’s Media, Culture, and Communication program.

Julie Chen is from San Jose, CA. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College in 2024, and was a Fulbright Fellow researching Chinese fast fashion workers in Prato, Italy, from 2019-20. She works as a fundraiser for CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. She also makes music as Slime Queen.

Lucia (Lulu) Yao Gioiello (b.New York City) is a creative director and founder of the cross-cultural book series and platform FAR–NEAR, aimed at broadening perspectives of Asia through image, person, idea and history to unlearn the inherent dominative mode. She lives and works in New York City. Working through the cross-cultural effects of imperialism and migration, her annual printed book series FAR– NEAR aims to blur the boundaries in which Asia is positioned and viewed on a global scale. She has developed an on- and offline space for the international Asian creative community to express and share cultural commentary freely. Her work has influenced curators and artists such as Kikuji Kawada and Xiaochan Hua of Hua International to curate further exhibitions on the topic. Her work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library Special Collections, The Franklin Furnace/MoMA Artists’ Books Collection, the SVA Library and ICP library. Her books are sold in various art bookstores and galleries across Asia, the Americas, Europe and the UAE such as the Walker Art Center, Tsutaya Ginza, 0fr Paris, Artbook at MoCA and more. In addition to FAR–NEAR, she writes and directs stories for various publications, galleries and art collectives such as Document Journal, Circa.art, Beyond Noise and WHAAM Gallery. She supports herself and her artistic endeavors as a freelance creative director in still and moving image for clients like Prada, YSL Beauty, Apple, Marriott International and other globally influential brands.

Maureen Catbagan is a Pilipinx-American, multi-media artist based in New York whose work engages social collectivity and explores the intersections of immigration, labor, and visibility. They have collaborated with Flux Factory, Yams Collective, Abang-guard with artist Jevijoe Vitug, and have co-written articles with Dr. Amber Jamilla Musser.

Recent exhibitions include “Perfect Imperfect” at Lichtundfire Gallery, New York, NY (2024); “in pieces…” at PS122 Gallery, New York, NY (2023); and “Lights, Tunnels, Passages, & Shadows” solo exhibition at The Center for Book Arts, New York, NY (2021). Their individual and collaborative works have been exhibited, screened, and/or performed in the CICA Museum (Gyeonggi-do, Korea), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Abrons Art Center, Socrates Park, and Whitney Museum of American Art (all in NYC), Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, Netherlands), and The Contemporary Museum (Honolulu, Hawaii).

Catbagan has been awarded residencies with Abang-guard at Residency Unlimited (Brooklyn, NY), and The Six-Foot Platform at DUMBO Art (Brooklyn, NY), and with Flux Factory at Governors Island (NYC), ARoS Museum Public Atelier (Aarhus, Denmark), and Art Quarter Budapest (Hungary). Fellowships and grants include 2024-25 Queens Museum-Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, 2021 NYFA-City Artists Corps Grant, and 2020 Critical Minded for Cultural Critics Grant.

Philip Poon is an architect, artist, and writer whose work engages the complex dynamics of a changing Manhattan Chinatown and the relationship of Asian-American identity within it. Informed by his background as a Chinese-American from New York City, his work as a registered architect, and his engagement with art and activist movements in Chinatown, his projects materialize issues at the intersection of space, race, and class. He had a solo exhibition at the Pearl River Mart Gallery and has exhibited at La MaMa Galleria, WSA, Citygroup, and On Canal. His critical writing has been published in Other Almanac, Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts, and Untapped, and his work has appeared in Art in
America, ArtAsiaPacific, Chicago Review of Books, The Architect’s Newspaper, South China Morning Post, Sing Tao Daily, World Journal, Deem, and more.

Rujuta Rao was born in Goa, India, and is based in Jersey City, NJ. Rao’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, book and sound art, alongside conceptual and functional garments. Her practice is research-led and intensely personal, investigating the fragility and limitations of materials relating to place, family history, and hospitality. Rao received her MFA in interdisciplinary art from Parsons School of Design and BFA in sculpture from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Artist residencies and fellowships include CCA Islands Travel Fellowship, Japan; ISSP Riga Residency, Latvia; Civita Institute Fellowship, Italy; and The Rejoinders Residency, UK. Rao is a 2024 Workspace Artist in Residence at the Center for Book Arts in New York, where she is developing wearable publications.

Sixing Xu (b. 1996, Beijing) is an artist, writer, and translator based in Brooklyn. Informed by a crisscrossing movement between linguistic borders, she makes sculpture–text installations that mine other(ed) meanings and storylines out of the insignificant, the accidental, and the peripheral. Xu has exhibited works at 601Artspace, New York; NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Current Plans, Hong Kong; Shanghai Himalayas Museum; Chengdu Times Art Museum; gallery no one, Chicago, among others. Xu’s writings and projects have appeared in print and on the digital platforms of Spike Art Magazine, Sine Theta Magazine, Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, and Macalline Art Center. She was a participant in Triple Canopy’s 2024 Publication Intensive and the co-founder of Pararailing, an artist-run nomadic space and organization. Xu holds a BA in Media Studies from Vassar College.

Xinyi Li is an educator and designer trespassing and dwelling on multiple thresholds. Her practice includes pedagogical expression, diagrammatic media, and visual opacity. Her recent work addresses diasporic experiences and food practice, digital resistance and creative subversions, and language and pedagogy in transnational and transcultural contexts. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at Pratt Institute. With the group post-radical pedagogy, she questions the values and legacies that shape design pedagogical practice. Previously, she collaborated on Digital Humanities projects and engaged with design research for healthcare experience.

Xyza Cruz Bacani (b. 1987, the Philippines) is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. Her experience as a second-generation domestic worker in Hong Kong informs her practice and engagement in less visible, erased, and underreported world events. Her works explore migration, transnational identity, climate change, and labor. Bacani received her M.A. in Arts Politics at New York University in 2022. She has been recognized as one of Asia Society’s Asia 21 Young Leaders, Artpil’s 30 Under 30 Women Photographers, Forbes’s 30 Under 30 Asia, and BBC’s 100 Women of the World. Her artistic accomplishments are documented by the Philippines House of Representatives under ‘House Resolution No. 1969’. She received multiple grants from the WMA Commission, the Open Society Moving Walls Foundation, and the Pulitzer Center, and was one of the Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellows. She is also the author of We Are Like Air. Bacani’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of the City of New York, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, KADIST Collection, Foreign Correspondents Club Hong Kong, New York University Special Collections, and numerous private collections worldwide.

AAAinA’s general programming and operations are funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, Ruth Foundation, and the Vilcek Foundation.