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.