Application Open Date: Friday, June 7, 2024

Application Due Date: Friday, July 5, 11:59PM

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.

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.