Holly Lee, 1953–2024
By Annette Meier
Portrait of HOLLY LEE. Courtesy WMA, Hong Kong.
Holly Lee, a Hong Kong artist and pioneer of conceptual photography in the region, has passed away at the age of 71. Her death was announced by Hong Kong-based nonprofit platform WMA on September 15.
Despite initially training in literature, the Hong Kong-born artist pivoted to photography in the late 1970s, juxtaposing historical and contemporary elements in her work to reflect the city’’s complex cultural identity. From 1981 to 1986, Lee created her first photography series, Pictures of My Friends, Artists and Others, which features around 30 black-and-white portraits of Hong Kong creatives. Many of the subjects were her peers, including her husband and fellow artist Lee Ka-sing.
Lee is best known for her Hollian Thesaurus series (1994–2000), which comprises 12 portraits that fuse photography, vintage imagery, and 19th-century export painting from Guangdong. Further inspired by Renaissance paintings, the images explore the past and future of Hong Kong around the time of the city’s 1997 handover from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China. For this work, Lee experimented with new digital technologies such as Photoshop, presenting photography as more than just a journalistic or documentary medium. Her most recognized portrait from this series is The Great Pageant Show (c. 1997), which features a Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant winner in the likeness of Queen Elizabeth II, positioned in front of a Qing court painting.
Beyond her personal artmaking endeavors, Lee also ventured into publishing and curating photographic collections with her husband. The couple founded and edited Dislocation, a monthly photography journal in Hong Kong that was active from 1992 to 1999, as well as Double Double, a weekly online periodical. In 1995, they founded the OP (Original Photograph) project, which created limited edition prints of works by contemporary photographers in Hong Kong, including Yau Leung, Ngan Chun-tung, and Mak Fung. Through this initiative, the artist duo helped recast photography in Hong Kong as an art form in its own right.
After relocating to Toronto with her family in 1997, Lee and her husband set up a variety of galleries and art studio spaces, including INDEXG, where she coordinated exhibition programs from 2006 to 2018. More recently, she focused on writing projects, producing fiction, essays, as well as poetry anthologies, such as Nine Years (2020) and The Air is like a Butterfly (2021), which were published by Ocean Pounds, an online platform that she also developed with her husband. This year, she founded the Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee Archive in Toronto, which includes a selection of both artists’ works related to Hong Kong’s photography scene during the 1990s.
Throughout her career, Lee received various accolades, including Hong Kong’s Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (1994); the Kodak Grand Award and Gold Award in Digital Imaging from the Hong Kong Institute of Professional Photographers (1993 and 1995, respectively); and the award for Best of Multimedia in the Pan Pacific Digital Artistry Competition (1996). Her work is featured in the collections of the Hong Kong Heritage Museum and M+.
Lee is survived by her husband, Ka-sing, and their daughter.
Annette Meier is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.
