Archives Within the Archive- Part I

 Archives Within the Archive


Framework

With this issue, ARCHIVE begins the first installment of a three-part series titled Archives Within the Archive. Together, these three consecutive issues will be collected as ARCHIVE Collected Volume 71–80, Part Two.

Each issue revisits archival material from a different exhibition presented over the past several years. Considered together, they document three key moments in the development of the Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee Archive, offering a valuable point of reference for future research into its history and evolution.

Part I (ARCHIVE 78) presents a complete reprint of DOUBLE DOUBLE: Box-in-a-Valise (On-site), the exhibition brochure published for the exhibition held in May 2020.

Part II (ARCHIVE 79) reprints THE 50 GLADSTONE: Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee Archive (Works, Objects, Artifacts, 1976 to Current), the exhibition brochure produced for the inauguration of the Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee Archive, established in Toronto in April 2024.

Part III (ARCHIVE 80) focuses on the exhibition At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds, Part II, presented by Asia Art Archive. Bringing together rare archival materials from four artists at the age of twenty-five, the exhibition featured Holly Lee as the artist representing Hong Kong. This special issue presents complete documentation of Holly’s contribution to the exhibition. The year 1978, when Holly was twenty-five, marked her first year devoted to photography, and forms part of the beginning years of the photographic practice we began together in 1975—a journey that would continue for several decades.


Archives Within the Archive, Part I

Our Archive Project began in 2019 with the launch of the weekly webzine DOUBLE DOUBLE, conceived as a platform for documenting and preserving the work we were producing each week. By the end of that year, we began to imagine an exhibition built from the materials already gathered on our tables.

As Holly wrote in her introduction:
“About half a year ago, when we were working on the archives of our work for the past forty years, we picked up the idea of bringing it into an exhibition—to build a portable, personal museum gathering work from the earlier days, to mix with new and recent pieces, an exhibition that can travel.”

Scheduled to open in May 2020 as part of the CONTACT Photography Festival, the exhibition was fully installed just as the COVID-19 pandemic brought the city into lockdown. Although it remained on site for several months, the exhibition was never able to open to the public.

The exhibition was inspired in part by Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, as Holly noted, and was further shaped by our visit in 2018, to The Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, created by Orhan Pamuk. Conceived as a portable and organic exhibition, DOUBLE DOUBLE: Box-in-a-Valise was intended to be transportable, adaptable to different sites, and capable of evolving in both theme and scale according to the materials assembled.

The exhibition was accompanied by a plan for three related publications: On-site, Close-cropped, and Footnotes. Close-cropped was designed as a visual selection of scanned artworks from the exhibition. On-site documented the installation itself, recording all 112 exhibited objects (or series), each identified by its unique catalogue number. Footnotes was conceived as a text-only companion volume, with a short essay or dictionary-style entry devoted to every exhibited item.

The concept for Footnotes ultimately proved far more ambitious than anticipated. As a result, only fragments of that volume were completed and made available online, while the publication itself remained unfinished.

In this issue of ARCHIVE, we present the complete reprint of On-site, documenting all 112 works and objects included in the exhibition.