Asia Art Archive was established in 2000 in Hong Kong to document and secure the multiple recent histories of contemporary art in the region. Built through a systematic programme of research and information gathering, it is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading public collections of primary and secondary source material about contemporary art in Asia, comprising hundreds of thousands of physical and digital items, searchable via its online catalogue. A growing selection of digitised material is now also available in the Collection Online.

An understanding of the museum as an exhibiting space, rather than as a research-based organisation, has led to the current lack in China of institutions tasked with archiving and making art documentation public. A number of projects organised by the author in Shanghai and elsewhere, including History in the Making: Shanghai 1979-2009 and From a History of Exhibitions towards a Future of Exhibition-Making, have addressed the role of archives in exhibition making, while developing new documentary resources for curatorial and art historical research.

China’s publishing landscape today remains a harsh environment, dominated by the state industry and hostile to outside intruders. A few small independent art publishers, design studios and self-publishing artists have appeared in recent years in Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities, a series of developments that signal new directions for the future of art publishing in this country.

This article gives an account of the research methods and editing procedures used to inform the production of two recent books, Contemporary Art in Shanghai: Conversations with Seven Chinese Artists and ‘Avant-garde’ Art Groups in China, 1979-1989, focusing on issues related to the use of interviews and documentary sources in Chinese contemporary art research. As well as drawing attention to a range of contingent factors impinging on the reliability of interviews and documentary sources within the particular discursive contexts of China and to ways of mitigating their effects, it argues for the productive possibilities of the serial use of interviews in combination with other texts as critical polylogues.

Chinese art has always been well-represented within SOAS Library. This article provides an overview of the Chinese art and archaeology collection, highlighting materials that make it unique, from rare books to literati paintings and woodblock prints. As the Library approaches its centenary, some of the issues that have influenced its past, such as limitations of space, are still informing its future. With increasing attention paid to modern and contemporary Chinese art, efforts have been made to build the collection to reflect this emphasis. As it has throughout SOAS’s history, the Library and the Chinese art and archeology collection continue to evolve to reflect new research interests, academic courses and the needs of its users.

The library of the Freer Gallery of Art | Arthur M. Sackler Gallery is considered one of the finest East Asian art research collections in the United States. The development and progress of the library’s Chinese Collection has mirrored the historical changes in the field of Chinese art studies in the last one hundred years. Today, the library collection has more than 90,000 volumes, including 17,437 Chinese language monographs and 836 serials in over 25,000 volumes. In a landscape of changing scholarship, technology and user demands, the library is balancing the use of printed materials and digital resources and collaborating with other libraries to continue to meet the needs of curators, researchers and visitors.

What should a research library in a small specialist art museum be? The Asian Art Museum’s research library is a unique and rich collection of material on Asian cultural history, with over 40% of its holdings dedicated to Chinese art, history, culture and religion. The author provides an overview of its history and highlights some of its Special Collections and items of interest. Current and future developments are also discussed, including an ongoing project to make pre-1998 catalogue records available online.

During the 20th century a range of museums in the United States were engaged in acquiring Chinese art objects, developing major collections of painting and calligraphy, ancient bronze, Buddhist sculpture, ceramics and other decorative arts. Research materials on Chinese art have been collected by art libraries in major museums and the East Asian libraries of the main research universities. The author surveys significant Chinese art collections in museums and research libraries in the United States today.