M! Editorial note (2026-10-11)

 Recently, Robert Black began a new series of writings, Poetic Responses to Photography, in which he responds to my photographic work through poetic language. The first piece was written in response to The Thinbit Studio, while the second, published in this issue of MONDAY ARTPOST, takes moment / memory as its subject. To accompany this new piece, we are reprinting the moment / memory series in this issue of M!, offering readers an opportunity to encounter the work from a different perspective through the interplay between the photographs and Black’s poetic responses.

moment / memory is an ongoing series. Although its larger narrative continues to unfold, each diptych may also be read individually, as a self-contained piece of fiction. The series takes shape through the rephotographing of an archive of negatives made by Ka-sing and Holly between 1974 and the late 1990s. The narrative that emerges is not simply a reconstruction of the past, but one created in the present through selection, sequencing, and viewing. In this sense, each work is also a form of fiction, since the choice of images and the order in which they are presented are necessarily subjective.

Presented as diptychs, the works draw primarily on analogue photographs made during those years, documenting the people we encountered, the friends and artists we knew, and the events we came across. Together, these materials form what we refer to as the Hong Kong chapter: a span of twenty-five years, from the early days of our photographic practice through the late 1990s.

As Black remarks in his author’s note, in this series he is “trying to both subvert the traditional Art Essay and remain true to the underlying poetry, and experimentation of Lee’s full body of work”. His poetic responses are themselves a form of fiction, offering another way of approaching the photographs beyond the conventions of the art essay.

Here, perhaps, lies a point of connection between the two practices. The subjective act of seeing, selection, or sequencing, its meaning is continually reshaped in the present, like the poetic act of responding, It opens up possibilities.