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.