Archives Within the Archive- Part III

 Archives Within the Archive, Part III





At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds - Holly Lee

To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Asia Art Archive, the organization presented a series of special events. Among them was At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds, an exhibition featuring four artists from the cities where Asia Art Archive maintains offices, each looking back to the period when they were twenty-five years old. Holly Lee’s chapter centred on the year 1978, when she herself was twenty-five.

This issue of ARCHIVE forms the final instalment of our three-part series, Archives Within the Archive. Taking Holly’s exhibition as its point of departure, it serves as a companion volume rather than simply a report on the exhibition itself. Instead of documenting the display, we look more closely at the years surrounding Holly’s twenty-fifth birthday—her formative years as an artist, the beginning of her photographic practice, and the early days of our studio.

Alongside the works and artefacts presented in the exhibition, we have drawn additional materials from our archive. Together, they expand the story through six interconnected sections:

    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

Although the exhibition focused primarily on 1978 and the years immediately surrounding it, this issue widens the timeline. We have included materials from Holly’s earlier years, as well as documents from the early years of our studio. We established the studio in February 1977, and Holly joined it later that year.

By the beginning of 1978, as she turned twenty-five, photography had become her profession. When reflecting on the development of our practice, we often describe the years from 1976 to 1987 as our “Early Years.” This issue offers an opportunity to look more closely at the first half of that period, when many of the ideas and working methods that would shape the decades to come were first taking form.

The earliest years of an artist’s life often reveal patterns that become fully visible only in retrospect. Looking back from the perspective of later decades, one can see how seemingly small decisions, friendships, habits, and discoveries gradually developed into a coherent artistic language. Holly’s journey is especially clear in this regard. Many of the qualities that would later define her work—her way of seeing, her literary sensibility, her quiet attentiveness, and even the smallest gestures behind the camera—can already be found in these formative years. They survive in the everyday traces that an archive allows us to revisit.