7-DAY READ [M POST] Published on Mondays. Columns + Library Highlight + Archive + Poetry

7-DAY READ [ARCHIVE] Published as an accumulating long-form journal by Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee Archive, comprises articles, fragments, and thematic features released on every Sunday.

DAILY COLUMN [TERRAIN] Photographs by Lee Ka-sing with haiku by Gary Michael Dault

DAILY COLUMN [Diptych Diary 2026]

Initiated in 2014, Lee Ka-sing’s Diptych Diary is a sustained practice pairing poetic reflection with visual perception. Conceived as a Tai Chi–like exercise of the mind, the series juxtaposes images drawn from the artist’s daily photographic practice to generate shifting meanings. Resuming in 2026 after a period of reduced activity, the project returns with accelerated momentum.

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ONGOING: [Night Reading] Lee Ka-sing: Whispers to Holly’s diaries

The Night Reading series began in November 2024, about two months after Holly’s passing. Following her departure, I started organizing the things she left behind. In addition to her photographic and textual works, there were also a large number of personal diaries, creative notes, and travel journals. Naturally, these included many of the letters we had exchanged as well.

ONGOING: [CLIPPINGS: Holly Lee Archive Column at M POST]

Holly Lee: Birthday Cake

The year 2024 marked a pivotal period in Holly Lee’s life and practice. She passed away in September of that year, having acknowledged it herself, as the most difficult year for her health, and paradoxically, it was also among the most productive and generative periods of her creative life.

During this time, Holly completed several significant works. She created “Days Book: 1926 Tang 鄧 | 1996 Man 文 | 2016 Chai 茶,” Op.25 (2024), for a group exhibition at Asia Art Archive (18 March–31 August 2024). She also finished “An Afternoon in October 1996,” the final episode of her long-running and widely recognised series “Hollian Thersaurus,” Op.15 (1993–2024). The raw materials for this concluding work had been prepared and scanned in the late 1990s, yet the piece itself was not completed until the final months before her passing. As Ka-sing has noted, this work functions in part as a form of autobiography—though not a self-portrait—articulated through the presence of a sitter. It was presented in a two-person exhibition at WMA with Sharon Lee (24 August–6 October 2024). In the same exhibition, Holly’s fictional work “Sushi Grass in Paradise” (written between 2019 and 2020) was published as part of the exhibition, appearing as a 460-page book that included a Chinese translation by Chris Song. Earlier that year, in July, she also published “If Sculpture Could Talk,” a collaborative book of poems responding to sculptures by Bill Grigsby.

Now shelved in the Library, “Birthday Cakes” is the book form of a project presented under the same title as an installation at 50 GLADSTONE, on view from 27 April to 28 July 2024—less than two months before Holly’s passing. “Birthday Cakes,” Op.24 (2024), was developed over more than a decade, bringing together photographs of birthday cakes accumulated across the years within her family: those of her daughter Iris, herself, and Ka-sing. Some of the cakes were made by Iris for her parents, others for herself; some were custom-ordered, often bearing personalised messages. These photographs do not foreground technical virtuosity or formal precision. Rather, they are bound by affect, memory, and lived experience. Installation and the pictorial concept, rather than photographic refinement, constitute the core of the work.

In the exhibition, thirty birthday cake photographs were displayed in varying sizes, each housed in ready-made frames collected over many years specifically for this purpose. The book “Birthday Cakes” is produced in an 8 × 10 inch format, comprising 100 pages with a hardcover binding. Only five copies were printed. Conceived late in the exhibition’s preparation, the book functioned primarily as reference material for visitors and was not intended for public circulation. An ebook edition is now available in the Library for research purposes.

Beyond documenting the installation, the book presents individual reproductions of the thirty framed photographs, each accompanied by a brief note by Holly. Preceding the plates is her essay “Tinkerbell and Fairy Cakes” (dated March 2024), referencing Tinkerbell, the kindergarten attended by her daughter Iris. Iris’s school years in the 1980s form an underlying point of departure for the project. An image detail from a Tinkerbell birthday party—drawn from Holly’s “Hong Kong Memories,” Op.11 (1993)—is used as the book’s endpapers, visually enfolding the narrative. The book closes with Holly’s text “Birthday arcades and some fond memories” (dated April 2024), in which she reflects on Suki, the family cat, and his presence at each family birthday over the years. The book is dedicated “For my beloved, Ka-sing, Iris and Suki,” printed at the opening of the publication.

“Birthday Cakes” is a work deeply rooted in family, affection, narrative, and poetic observation. It is markedly different in scale and ambition from series such as”Hollian Thersaurus,” which has been described by critics as “an important example of Hong Kong art history, musing on the past and future of Hong Kong around 1997… symbolic of East–West cultural dialogue on religion and power” (Ellen Oredsson, M+ Museum). Yet Holly’s sustained engagement with intimacy, domestic life, and personal memory constitutes another vital dimension of her practice. Her broader interests in culture, history, and geography shaped the intellectual scope of her work, while sensitivity and emotional clarity allowed her to move fluidly across registers.

The book “Birthday Cakes” is not merely a document of the installation; it is an integral component of the work itself.

Lee Ka-sing — Works in Ebook Edition. A curated selection of works in ebook format.

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ONGOING: [Library Highlight] Current issue and Previous chapters

ONGOING: [Snail Mail from the Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee Archive]

About "Snail Mail from the Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee Archive"

In November 2025, as part of a collaborative exhibition, Lee Ka-sing presented Snail Mail to a Minimalist. This work later became a reference point for the mail art project Snail Mail from the Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee Archive. Here, “snail mail” refers primarily to the postcard as an artistic medium, while also pointing to its position as a counterpoint to email: a form of communication that is tactile, time-bound, and organic, rather than instantaneous and binary.

The Chinese title of the project, 寄自李家昇黃楚喬文件庫的問好, offers further clarity. 問好 (wènhǎo) translates as “greeting” or “hello.” Read together with the English title, it describes a greeting sent by physical mail from the Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee Archive. This gesture lies at the core of the project: a selected item from the Archive is printed as a postcard, handwritten, and mailed to a friend.

The “item” may take many forms—an object, a work, a photograph, an artifact, or even a fragment that evokes memory. Selection is drawn exclusively from the shared archive of Ka-sing and Holly. Given the archive’s breadth and diversity, the project gradually evolved into a medium through which the archive itself could circulate. As these fragments accumulate, they form a body of material that may, in time, support exhibition-based research or curatorial inquiry. The project also contributes to Thousand Objects, an ongoing writing project on archival practice currently undertaken by Ka-sing.

By design, Snail Mail from the Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee Archive is modest and approachable. Its scale and intimacy make each postcard both accessible and collectible. These “snail mails” are small, welcoming, and handcrafted—never mass-produced—and are created using materials consistent with those found in the artists’ original works. Each typically bears a signature, reinforcing its singularity.

Postcards have long been a medium central to both Holly and Ka-sing’s artistic practice. Over the decades, they have produced numerous postcards through traditional offset printing, alongside handmade editions. In the mid-1980s, they published Qui Ying, a poetry zine composed of eight accordion-folded postcards. In the 1990s, they co-authored a regular column for the computer magazine PC Home, printed on heavy card stock to invite direct interaction from readers. More recently, in 2019, Holly wrote the fiction Istanbul Postcards, consisting of eighteen original handwritten postcards mailed from Istanbul to a friend in Toronto.

Launched in 2026, Snail Mail from the Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee Archive extends this lineage, adding another chapter to a sustained and evolving engagement with mail art as a mode of communication, memory, and exchange.

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[Yesterday Hong Kong] Original fibre-based silver prints by Yau Leung, Mak Fung, and Ngan Chun-tung, printed in the 1990s and signed by the artists.