Swan House Trailer
A house is like a mirror of the person who’s living there. To Ka-sing the photographer, the portrait of a house is also a portrait of the house owner in a lightly subdued way. Swan House has been the home for Toronto artist, educator and art critic Gary Michael Dault and his wife Malgorzata for nearly ten years. It is situated in the town of Napanee, Eastern Ontario, about two and a half hours drive from Toronto. Gary calls his home Swan House, for the gorgeous Victorian detached house was built in 1860, and elegantly bedecked with stained-glass swans. In the winter of 2019, Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee visited Swan House for two days. The photographs from Swan House were originally released in the e-zine DOUBLE DOUBLE. It is now published as a book, with a compilation of 166 photographs. For two days, from morning to night, Ka-sing had been exploring Swan House, moving from the sun-filled library (where a grand piano was situated) to the dining room; from the kitchen to the cinema room; the poetry room to the French literature room, quietly studied every delicate detail of the house. In discreet and subtle ways, Lee harvested a significant body of pictures at a leisurely pace. His repeated gaze, gentle observation, and atmospheric rendering of Swan House readily discharged some remarkable quality; the idly flow of images, softly subdued and dreamlike. A deeply meditative and tender book; a slow soul trip to beauty, mystery and tranquility. In the correspondence Gary wrote to Ka-sing and Holly after seeing the book, he said, “The photographs, soft as cat fur or the pearly backs of the rock-doves in the garden, generate an endless mystery: they seem to live both in the documentary present and equally (more so, actually) in the soft archival past… as well as a glorious nonstop beauty!”
A house is like a mirror of the person who’s living there. To Ka-sing the photographer, the portrait of a house is also a portrait of the house owner in a lightly subdued way. Swan House has been the home for Toronto artist, educator and art critic Gary Michael Dault and his wife Malgorzata for nearly ten years. It is situated in the town of Napanee, Eastern Ontario, about two and a half hours drive from Toronto. Gary calls his home Swan House, for the gorgeous Victorian detached house was built in 1860, and elegantly bedecked with stained-glass swans. In the winter of 2019, Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee visited Swan House for two days.
The photographs from Swan House were originally released in the e-zine DOUBLE DOUBLE. It is now published as a book, with a compilation of 166 photographs.
For two days, from morning to night, Ka-sing had been exploring Swan House, moving from the sun-filled library (where a grand piano was situated) to the dining room; from the kitchen to the cinema room; the poetry room to the French literature room, quietly studied every delicate detail of the house. In discreet and subtle ways, Lee harvested a significant body of pictures at a leisurely pace. His repeated gaze, gentle observation, and atmospheric rendering of Swan House readily discharged some remarkable quality; the idly flow of images, softly subdued and dreamlike. A deeply meditative and tender book; a slow soul trip to beauty, mystery and tranquility.
In the correspondence Gary wrote to Ka-sing and Holly after seeing the book, he said, “The photographs, soft as cat fur or the pearly backs of the rock-doves in the garden, generate an endless mystery: they seem to live both in the documentary present and equally (more so, actually) in the soft archival past… as well as a glorious nonstop beauty!”
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for Gary and Malgorzata
Double Double Winter 3, 2019
Swan House
A two-day visit to Swan House at Napanee
Photographs by Lee Ka-sing
Words by Holly Lee
Contents based on the
Double Double electronic magazine
Issue 1220-2019 with additional materials
First edition
December, 2021
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in
Publication
Photography, Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-989845-19-6
Design by DOUBLE DOUBLE studio
Swan House
Copyright © Lee Ka-sing 2021
All Rights Reserved
Lee Ka-sing’s official website:
www.leekasing.com
For information about permission to reproduce
material from this book
write to mail@oceanpounds.com
Published by OCEAN POUNDS
50 Gladstone Avenue, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M6J 3K6
www.oceanpounds.com
a suite of 166 photographs
taken at Swan House
from December 11 to 13, 2019
by Lee Ka-sing
G and M live in a paranoid small town where they avoid the
community and prefer the warmth, beauty and tranquility inside
their lovely Victorian home with a legion of eight cats: Orlando,
G’s favourite rescued cat, Emily (Dickinson), Teapot or Teepee, who
appears in one of his drawings, Grigio (the colour of the cat), Lew
(Lewis Carroll), Melville (Herman), Vita (Sackville-West), and Amber,
who loathes visitors and hides in the poetry room on the second floor
as long as the guests are inside the house - which by all means is a
small paradise, and from the nearby farmers market M would bring
back all sorts of Winter squash: acorn, buttercup butternut, dumpling,
hubbard, pumpkin, kabocha and spaghetti, stacking them up on the
tables in such ways that they look like pieces of art. Now the aromatic
smells of scones and coffee permeate the kitchen, suggesting that
M is preparing for today’s special cooking - a day-long feast for G’s
birthday, and as a reminder, a hand-written note is taped on the door
of the kitchen cabinet: Breakfast - banana rose-water-scented scones
with cardamon-scented coffee; Lunch - toasted bagels with cream
cheese, adding wild smoked salmon, rounds of red onion, cucumber
slices and capers; Dinner - squash gnocchi in mushroom cream
sauce, warm red cabbage salad; Desert: poached pears in spiced
pomegranate juice, and at the bottom of the paper, M also reminds
herself in red the bottle of rose wine in the refrigerator, a sparkling
wine she hand-picked to celebrate G’s 81st birthday. Deep down she
believes G’s unspoken love and admiration of every single meal she
has cooked, a blessed life together, endowed with good, healthy
food year-long, so much and so run-over that he can easily do away
with his birthday as the reason for the all-day feast, and proudly
proclaim, EVERYDAY IS A FEAST. (Holly Lee)
Lee Ka-sing, a photo-based artist grew up in Hong Kong and resides in Toronto, Canada
since 1997. He was awarded “Artist of the Year” (1989) by the Hong Kong Artists’
Guild, and the Fellowship for Artistic Development (1999) presented by Hong Kong Arts
Development Council. Selected monographs include Thirty-one Photographs, Forty Poems
- photographs 1995-98, The Language of Fruits and Vegetables, De ci de là des choses.
Lee Ka-sing’s work is in private and public institutions and museum collections such as the
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, M+ Museum and the Hong Kong Heritage
Museum.
Holly Lee is from Hong Kong, lives and works in Toronto since 1997. From the early
eighties she worked as a professional photographer and continuing a career for almost
twenty years. In Toronto she spent close to two decades managing galleries, before
retreating from gallery administration to focus on writing in 2019. She has two poetry
books published: Nine Years 九 年 (2020) and The Air is like a Butterfly (2021).
View a full version
(348 pages) of this
publication ($1) at
Reading Room -
https://oceanpounds.com/blogs/rr/sh
a paperback edition of
this publication is also
available ($120)
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