The Fountain: An Editorial Note

 Holly had two major literary works in mind that she never had the opportunity to complete. One was a long poem about Hong Kong; the other, a novel based on her own life. Although neither project was realized, traces of both can be found in The Fountain, a work that now occupies a unique position within her creative path.

In a journal entry dated July 2, 2021, Holly noted the initial idea for the long poem. It might begin in the sixteenth century, with pirate ships sailing along the coast of Hong Kong. In the days that followed, she continued researching and developing the concept. Yet on another page she questioned whether she should go back so far into history, or begin instead with a period closer to her own experience:
“Do I have to go that far back? Or just start with the time I was born? In the mid-fifties... I should start with a more familiar time period, 1950–...”

A considerable body of research material still remains. The poem, however, never reached its first line.

The other project was a novel drawn from her own life. At one point she even had a title for it: Xiaoping’s Story (《小萍的故事》), Xiaoping being her childhood name. The idea had likely been with her for more than twenty years. She mentioned it to me many times, and we often discussed possible structures and narrative directions. Originally she intended to write it in Chinese, but later decided it would be written in English, the language she increasingly adopted in her later literary work.

In many ways, these two unwritten projects belonged to the same thread. Holly’s family history and the history of Hong Kong were inseparable. One project would have approached that story through a city; the other through a family.

The Fountain emerged from this background. It can be read as a miniature version—or perhaps a fragment—of the larger novel she carried in her mind. A testing ground. Holly’s family history was layered and complex, with relationships crossing generations and continents, creating rich possibilities for narrative. She never knew her father in person and communicated with him only through letters. In one diary entry she wrote that, no matter how deep my love for her was, it could never replace the absence of a father’s love.

Family was always at the centre of Holly’s creative work. Whether in photography or writing, she repeatedly returned to those closest to her. Si-Ling and Owltoise 烏頭貓 Op. 2 (1985) was based on her daughter. The long-spannig Duo series Op. 7 (1991–2015) grew out of family portraits. Her final completed work, Days Book: 1926 Tang 鄧 | 1996 Man 文 | 2016 Chai 茶 Op. 25 (2024), became a reflection on three generations of women in her family—her grandmother, herself, and her daughter. The Fountain belongs firmly within this continuum.

Holly first drafted The Fountain around 2019–2020, shortly after she began serializing Sushi Grass in Paradise in our webzine DOUBLE DOUBLE. In February 2020, we launched our print-on-demand publishing project. The first title was Nine Years, a collection of her poems written between 2010 and 2018.

Over the next two years we accumulated experience with the medium. By the end of 2021, after DOUBLE DOUBLE had appeared weekly for 158 issues over three years, we decided to enter a second phase. The publication would become a monthly print-on-demand book of approximately 200 pages, each issue carrying its own title. Holly chose to rewrite The Fountain for the inaugural issue, published in January 2022.

At the same time, each issue would feature an invited guest artist. For the first volume we invited Sharon Lee, a younger-generation artist from Hong Kong. That invitation would unexpectedly set in motion a chain of events that became significant in Holly’s final creative years.

Written immediately after Sushi Grass in Paradise, The Fountain reveals a new maturity in Holly’s language and narrative craft. The work unfolds as a hybrid of fiction, autobiography, essay, and poetic prose. Throughout the text she embedded images—postcards, photographs, and other personal objects—not as illustrations but as integral parts of the narrative itself. Most of these objects came directly from her own life.

They cannot be separated from the work without diminishing it. This blending of document and fiction gives the story an unusual quality, making it read almost like an autobiography while remaining a work of fiction.

During those years, Holly and I often discussed the idea of incorporating real archival objects into literary writing. Those conversations later influenced my own fictional work A Floral Transformation (花 • 1996年10月19日回想錄 • 香港), created in 2024 for an exhibition organized by Asia Art Archive and constructed from a large number of archival materials. I have often thought that The Fountain benefited from being published within our own publishing framework. Had it appeared elsewhere, the integration of text and objects might not have been realized with the same freedom or effectiveness.

The story opens with a woman whose sleep has become fragmented after surgery, while radiotherapy and chemotherapy continue to take a visible toll on her body. Few readers would have known that this was drawn directly from Holly’s own experience. In 1992, shortly after our three-month journey together—including the final leg through Eastern Europe with Ping-kwan—she was diagnosed with cancer.

In the story, the protagonist visits two siamangs, Abek and Keba, at the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens. The animals are fictional, but the setting was deeply personal. During Holly’s treatments we lived for a period in an apartment near the Gardens.

The visit to the siamangs leads to the centre of the narrative: the Gardens, the fountain, and a treasured photograph showing Holly’s mother holding her as a child while sitting on the circular edge of the fountain.

Ultimately, The Fountain is a work about relationships. The relationship between Abek and Keba; between the fountain and the city; between Holly and her mother; between myself and my father; and, of course, between Holly and me. It is also about Holly’s lifelong relationship with photography itself.

As one passage states:
“The relationship was always difficult between you and your father, but you followed in his footsteps, anyway. You’ve become a photographer, and because of you, I’ve become one.”

A substantial section of the story explores the history of the fountain through found postcards from the 1880s. These lead Holly to the story of John Mitchell Dunlop, a master mariner employed by the Blue Funnel Line. Dunlop sat for a portrait by the pioneering Hong Kong photographer Lai Afong, as indicated by the studio stamp on the back of the photograph.

Drawing from another postcard, Holly imagined a scene in which Dunlop encountered Lai near the fountain. In a group photograph with Chinese scholars, Dunlop was impressed by the photographer’s professionalism and later commissioned his portrait. As a photographer herself, Holly filled these passages with vivid observations and details about photographic practice.

The purpose of this note is not to analyze or critique The Fountain, but rather to map some of the background, reference points, and circumstances that may help readers—and perhaps future researchers—understand the work.

In this issue of ARCHIVE, we reprint The Fountain in its original page design from the January 2022 issue of DOUBLE DOUBLE. Looking back, its publication became the starting point for several significant developments in the final years of Holly’s creative life.

One of these developments involved Sharon Lee. Although Holly did not know Sharon personally at the time, I had encountered her work during visits to Hong Kong. Ching-ping first introduced me to her practice. I saw her series The Crescent Void at Gallery Z. While I felt the installation was somewhat crowded, it was nevertheless a strong body of work. The series previously won the WMA Masters Award in 2019.

When planning the first issue of the new DOUBLE DOUBLE, I suggested featuring The Crescent Void. Like The Fountain, it was rooted in family, memory, and personal narrative. The pairing felt natural.

After seeing The Fountain, Sharon discovered an unexpected connection between her work and Holly’s fountain at the Botanical Gardens. Sharon had previously created Hi! Flora, Fauna at the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens. As part of her WMA award project, she proposed an exhibition bringing her work and Holly’s together around the shared theme of the Gardens.

In 2023 Sharon visited Toronto while conducting preliminary research for Asia Art Archive, for the project what would eventually become the Lee Ka-sing & Holly Lee Archive. It was then that she met Holly in person for the first time. During her stay they continued developing the exhibition proposal, including a Zoom meeting with representatives from WMA, where the project was formally confirmed.

Holly proposed enlarging every page of The Fountain and mounting them directly on the gallery walls. She also suggested publishing Sushi Grass in Paradise as a minimalist text-only book to be distributed to visitors. The exhibition’s theme was “home,” and her contribution was conceived primarily through the act of reading.

As the project developed, WMA invited Anthony Yung of Asia Art Archive to serve as curator. Anthony suggested that Holly focus on creating a formally published book rather than relying solely on exhibition materials. This recommendation ultimately led to the final shaping of Sushi Grass in Paradise, which was eventually released in an edition of thirty copies.

Later, Anthony suggested adding a new visual work if possible. In response, Holly completed the final work in her Hollian Thesaurus series, An Afternoon in October 1996. The raw material had existed for nearly three decades but had never been resolved into a finished piece. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if she sensed she was approaching the end of her life. Although the work features another sitter, it feels partly like a self-portrait.

During Sharon’s Toronto visit, and through those same discussions with Anthony, the Lee Ka-sing & Holly Lee Archive was also confirmed. Shortly afterward, Anthony invited both Holly and me to participate in his project Another Day in Hong Kong. For that occasion Holly created Days Book: 1926 Tang 鄧 | 1996 Man 文 | 2016 Chai 茶 Op. 25, the final work of her life.

Looking back across Holly’s creative life, both her photography and her writing moved repeatedly around the same centre: family and the city. Even in her earliest photographic series, Pictures of Friends, Artists, and Others Op. 1 (1981–1986), one of the most memorable portraits is that of her grandmother, Tang Wong-zim, My Grandmother. Later works such as Hong Kong Memories Op. 11 (1993) similarly intertwined family history, personal identity, and the traces of the city in which she grew up.

Her final completed work, Days Book: 1926 Tang 鄧 | 1996 Man 文 | 2016 Chai 茶 Op. 25 (2024), returned once again to family history across generations. Seen from this perspective, The Fountain occupies a distinctive position within her body of work. It stands between memory and fiction, and between completed works and those that remained unrealized. If Days Book can be understood as an outline for a larger work she no longer had time to complete, then The Fountain may be read as a miniature, or a carefully crafted fragment at the threshold of a long poem and the novel that would never be written.