Asia Art Archive welcomes Liu Nanxi and Jay Lau Ka Chun to our Try Try Zine Residency. The two residents were selected from a tremendously enthusiastic pool of responses to our open call for proposals related to AAA’s digital and physical Collections. This residency will support and develop zine-making activities more broadly at AAA, while encouraging artists to engage with and activate our Collections. 

Liu employs zines as a cornerstone for engaging and collaborating with Disability communities. Liu plans to activate AAA’s Reading Room to facilitate discussion and create works related to Disability arts and accessibility. Made collectively, the zines will document these activities and conversations. Versions of the zine may vary based on each person’s needs. 

Lau will create a woodblock print zine, replicating post-war Chinese propaganda materials hosted in AAA Collections, and rearrange them into a comic film-still sequence. His art practice focuses on processes of repetition and mechanical reproduction, contemplating the ways in which images are perceived, and how the obfuscation of constructed images can confront the image’s original intentions. 

Liu Nanxi is a community art worker, researcher, curator, Hong Kong Sign Language learner (Advanced V), and part-time lecturer of socially engaged art in the Department of Visual Studies at Lingnan University. Since 2013, she has been involved in arts for empowerment and inclusivity initiatives. Her research and practice relates to socially engaged art, psychoanalysis, domestic violence, art therapy, Disability politics, and community arts. Her publications include contributions in An Individual as a Society (2021), i-dArt The 2nd Art Course (4-Year) 2015-2019: Class Notes (2020), and Gwo Bean Vol 1 and 2 (2022). 

Jay Lau Ka Chun’s practice investigates the techniques of printmaking, photography, and moulding, emphasising the physical properties and cultural significance of the materials used in order to highlight the productive friction that emerges from interactions between materials and imagery. Lau earned a BA from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019, and was the recipient of Hong Kong Open Printshop’s Hong Kong Fine Print Award in the same year. He is currently pursuing an MFA at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.