Archives Within the Archive
At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds - Holly Lee
1. Holly’s literary background and her circle of friends
2. Printmaking and her early works
3. Her years of photo-text projects
4. The beginnings of our studio practice
5. Contact prints as a record of an artist’s daily life
6. Photo albums as personal archives
While preparations were underway for the exhibition At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds, the research team at Asia Art Archive approached me with an idea: to fill the large exhibition window with reproductions of our early contact prints. I immediately felt it was a good approach. The contact sheets themselves—with their raw, sequential frames—form a narrative of a particular period.
Fragments preserve the rhythm of life: friends, places, journeys, exhibitions, performance. I imagined the sunlight filtering through the window from outside, backlighting those moments-old contact sheets, allowing distant memories to shimmer once again.
To fit the exhibition space, the team requested thirty contact sheets. I scanned thirty-four in total, all of which are reproduced in this edition of ARCHIVE. For this publication, I have also added captions to selected details, offering additional context for certain frames and the people or events they depict. These captions were prepared while this edition was produced, and were not part of the exhibition.
Over the years, we assembled a dozen binders of contact prints, each containing approximately 150 contact sheets, covering the period from 1976 to the mid-1990s.
Due to the busy working schedule the later rolls of film were filed simply as negatives without contact prints, and some even remained unprocessed.
The selection presented here is
drawn primarily from the first two binders. Approximately the periods from 1976-1980.