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
Alternative cinema—what was then commonly called “art films”—was always among our greatest passions, although opportunities to see such films in Hong Kong during the early 1970s were limited. Occasionally I would skip an afternoon of school to attend a screening at the World Theatre (恆星戲院). One of the films I remember most vividly was the premiere of Tang Shu Shuen’s The Arch (董夫人). Holly, meanwhile, occasionally wrote several pages of reflections after seeing a film, recording her impressions in the diaries of the early 1970s.
During the early years we spent together, we came across the films of Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, Nagisa Oshima, and, later, the early short films of Peter Greenaway. Looking back, those encounters with cinema somehow shaped our artistic development. Their influence can be seen particularly in the first decade of our photographic practice, long before we fully realized how deeply they had entered our thinking.
By the late 1970s, opportunities to see alternative films had increased, particularly through the annual Hong Kong International Film Festival. The screenings at City Hall became as much social gatherings as cinematic events. Long queues would form outside the theatre, bringing together artists, writers, photographers, musicians, and people from many corners of Hong Kong’s cultural community. Greetings were exchanged sometimes along the line—a kind of analogue version of today’s social-media “likes.”
We became members of both the Phoenix Cine Club and Studio One, two organizations that made international cinema accessible to local audiences. Studio One, in particular, was remarkably well organized and cultivated a devoted community of viewers. In many ways it anticipated today’s MUBI, distributing monthly programmes to members and presenting carefully curated selections of films. I can no longer remember exactly when we joined, though it was probably after we established our Lan Kwai Fong studio. Later, after moving to Wyndham Street, we reserved the back cover of the Studio One programme for a series of full-page advertisements introducing our studio—an unconventional way of presenting ourselves to the creative community.
Beyond cinema, Holly was deeply drawn to performance. Alongside her sensitivity to literature, she possessed an equally instinctive understanding of music. I have often thought that had we not met, and had photography not become the path we pursued together, she might well have devoted herself to music. During her final illness, she said that if she recovered, she would begin singing again.
In 1976 we began attending performances of Cantonese rod puppetry, where we met the master puppeteer Mak Shiu Tong. We soon became friends. His troupe performed monthly in parks throughout Hong Kong with support from the Urban Council, and we followed their performances from venue to venue, photographing both the stage and the backstage. That same year I presented my first solo exhibition, A Photo Essay, a body of work based on Hon Lin Wah, the Cantonese rod puppet troupe.
Holly’s fascination with puppetry continued to grow. Before long we were following many other traditions as well: Chiu Chow glove puppets, string puppets, Indonesian shadow puppets, Japanese Kabuki, Vietnamese water puppets, and the distinguished Taiwanese puppet company I Wan Jan (亦宛然). We also photographed Cantonese opera artists such as Sun Ma Sze Tsang, Lam Kar Sing, and the Peking opera master Fan Guk Fa (粉菊花). It was therefore no coincidence that when Holly began her portrait series Pictures of Friends, Artists and Others in 1981, Fan Guk Fa and several puppeteers were among her sitters.
Our interest in puppetry unexpectedly altered Holly’s professional life as well. At one of Mak Shiu Tong’s birthday banquets, we happened to be seated beside Helga Burger, Programme Manager of the Hong Kong Arts Centre and an internationally respected scholar and collector of puppetry. During our conversation, she asked whether Holly had ever considered working at the Arts Centre. That chance encounter eventually led Holly to leave the bank where she had worked for five years, finally making the change she had long hoped for.
What had begun as personal curiosity gradually developed into photographic documentation, and then into a practice that combined photography with writing. Since both Holly and I came from literary backgrounds, this evolution felt almost inevitable. We were inspired by the integrated photo-text essays appearing in European and American magazines, and sought to explore a similar form ourselves.
Around that time, Outside the Ivory Tower (象牙塔外) emerged. Although financed by member of a prominent business family rather than by the literary establishment, the magazine was supported by many of our friends within Hong Kong’s cultural community. It provided an ideal platform for our collaborative approach, combining photographs with essays. We contributed extensively, producing features not only on performance traditions but also on subjects such as the To Fu industrial factory located in the New Territories and other aspects of everyday Hong Kong.
Holly also began writing short essays to accompany my photographs for the Asia Magazine of the South China Morning Post. Among the published features were pieces on a firecracker factory and on Cantonese rod puppetry. As our studio practice became increasingly demanding, however, we found less time for this kind of documentary journalism. Our photography gradually moved toward a more conceptual and metaphorical direction.
Yet something from those years remained. Documentary photography and writing had always required words to accompany the images—to deliver a message, or construct a narrative. In our later work, language no longer appeared explicitly beside the photographs, but it never disappeared. Instead, it became internal—a quiet structure beneath the image itself. The photographs continued to be shaped by language, carrying meanings that extended far beyond their visible surface.