Wong’s research will focus on the AGO’s Photography collection and programming to investigate the ways in which a “collective memory” is shaped through institutional collections. Drawing on the anthropological photographs of Jacques-Phillipe Potteau and the current Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition, Wong will examine how histories are constructed through museum practices. By considering the differences in representation between Potteau’s photographs of Asian and Asian diasporic peoples and Tillmans’ images of his friends, community and collaborators, Wong will trace ideas around the gaze, archive and objectivity in photography. Do these photographs claim to be “authentic” representations of their subjects? How has photography been used to uphold or subvert specific power dynamics or colonial structures? What is the relationship between these historical collections of photography to contemporary arts programming?
During their residency research mentorship program, Li and Zhang will continue “Unstranded Archive”, a project initiated in 2022 by them to record the embedded histories of Chinese artifact collections in Western museums. Attuned to historiography, they will do a comparative study of a photograph of an execution ground in China dated between 1845-1900, the Chinese artifacts present in the Thomson Collection and the 1851-catalog Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Using the photograph as an active anchor, they seek to query the impact of violent colonial and opium-wars exploitation on the transnational trade of Chinese artifacts; and to critique the discursive formation and streams of knowledge production of early photographs in producing a Eurocentric and imperial archive of history.