Hana, Picnic, Stones trailer

Double Double 2022-04

DOUBLE DOUBLE 2022-04
Hana, Picnic, Stones
A Holly Lee and Lee Ka-sing Publication
First published in Canada by OCEAN POUNDS
April 2022
ISBN: 978-1-989845-29-5
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Photography, Visual Art, Poetry, Literature, Culture
Authors: Holly Lee, Patrick Lee, Jin Ming, Lee Ka-sing
Copyright © Ocean Pounds 2022
Individual Copyrights belongs to the Artists and Writers.
All Rights Reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce material
from this book, please write to mail@oceanpounds.com
DOUBLE DOUBLE was published as a weekly webzine
from January 2019 to December 2021. A total of 158
issues were published. Full archives available online:
https://oceanpounds.com/blogs/doubledouble
Some of the issues were re-packaged and published as
print-on-demand paperback editions.
Since January 2022, DOUBLE DOUBLE has become a
monthly publication, released in both paperback (POD)
and ebook versions. POD is available for orders at OCEAN
POUNDS in Toronto or online at BLURB (blurb.com).
Hana, Picnic, Stones
DOUBLE DOUBLE ebook edition is available for read-on-line at
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Front Cover: Patrick Lee
Back Cover: Lee Ka-sing
End Pages: Holly Lee
Some artwork featured in this publication might be
available through OCEAN POUNDS
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OCEAN POUNDS
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Ontario, Canada M6J 3K6
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Holly Lee
Picnic
Essay, and
photographs from
Shan Hai Jin series
山 海 經

Bird with long neck
(Trinity Bellwoods Park 2011)

The park managed to evade concrete invasions. From the ridge of the dog bowl - the
last remnant of the creek ravine within the park, one can see the city tower, devouring
the ravishing sunset and sunrise. Dogs partying unleashed in the pit throughout the
year. In the winter, people go tobogganing. Someone told me they spotted more than
two white squirrels in the snow. I asked which ones? To distinguish the species, albino
squirrels have red eyes, white squirrels have black.
Picnic
I sat on the office chair we brought from Hong Kong with eyes closed. It was used as
a prop for a commercial shot many years ago. Birds outside my window twittering; the
room in front of me melted away. I thought of Robert Frank; he sat watching the sea.
Birds jumping from branch to branch chirping, in Cape Breton. I imagined myself as
Robert Frank so I could hear the sea.
In my mind journey I invent mountains and seas, in parks, in my proximity. It began
in 2010, the first image I saw was a picnic day, BCE 250. A modern age with a dash of
antiquity.
Faint commotion, tiny buzzing activities! I need a loupe to see what’s in there and
who’s doing what. Three people were sitting on the right. Wasn’t this scene Manet’s
picnic on the Grass? Wrong, the name of the famous painting is Luncheon on the
Grass. Manet painted it in 1863. Picnic on the Grass is the name of an oil painting on
Saatchi Art, by a 21st century painter Igor Zhuk. He was born in Kyiv, Ukraine - the
capital most talked-about now because of the war. In my picture, in Manet’s, and in
Igor’s, they all show a group of three people sitting, either gazing towards the viewer,
or engaging in their own conversation. It is a fine day for picnicking. These sediments
settled and coalesced into the organic churning of my mind, part primeval, part close
range. Reality is in a state of flux. I pluck a point in time like plucking the string of a
harp.
Here, along the grass where the three people were sitting, a creek was once flowing.
It stretched the length of the park and flowed beneath a bridge. The creek had since
long dried up and the bridge was dismantled, buried up in the same spot. A little down
south is the buried foundations of a college, a Gothic-Revival architecture built more
than a century and a half ago.
I sat in front of the computer fully immersed. I could keep on digging, repeating the
dull work of an archeologist and still finding things. I was led to a website where a
LIVE-NFT button was blinking, luring me to push. I ignored it, resisting this to be my
future. Universe, multiverse, metaverse. Virtual reality is not just mimicking our world;
it is gradually taking over. Despite legions of phenomenal thinkers, it is still confusing
to step into the future. Does spirituality need to be redefined? Would it become God,
this powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence?
This singularity, is he God?
Quieting down my fear for the future, I return to some of my photographs of the parks;
revaluing their significance, contemplating their resemblance to realistic landscape
paintings. They look calm, insipid and uneventful. But some genies seem to be lurking
behind the scenes. Zooming back to fifty years, a hundred or a thousand years, these
landscapes buried countless, anonymous stories that never passed down, nor making
marks on the same patches they stand on. I close my eyes and roll the office chair I sit
on back and forth, freeing my mind to do the traveling. In a eureka moment I fly over
mountains and valleys, rivers and seas, arriving at cloud cuckoo land; places where
myths die, and begin. I see a flock of gold-shedding birds flying past the woods; a
glowing object moving closer to another; giant bird with a long neck; summer through
winter, a structure with five basketball hoops waiting for a team to score.
I lift my head and squint my eyes at ten scorching suns, waiting for the archer. The
blinding light, the searing suns! I duck and collapse into the minuscule of being. I hear
sweet birds sing outside my window. The room, now big, now small, opens all doors to
the ocean. On the spur of the moment, I understand the birds’ language.
history, mythology
slip by
under our gaze, every Day -

Jin Ming
Djinn Lake
two photographs
COLLECTION

Djinn Lake I (1998), gelatin silver photograph, 476x336 mm. Signed and dated on verso

Patrick Lee
HANA
forty five photographs
and words

The rain has stopped, the clouds drifted away,
and the air clear once again.
When your heart is pure, all in your world is pure.
Abandon this fleeting world.
Abandon yourself.
The moon and flowers will guide your way.
Lucid Mind
Ryokan
1758-1831

Patrick Lee began his studies with the
Sogetsu School in Hong Kong in the late 70s
under the tutorship of Mrs. Janice Ding and
is greatly indebted to her for her personal
guidance and instruction over the years till her
emigration to the United States of America in
1995.
He does not have the abundance of nature
as in Japan for his floral materials. He picks
from whatever may be available from his
walks amidst the high-rises, the nearby parks
and vacant lands, looking out for the beauty
and the beautiful in the neglected and the
unappreciated, the poor and the humble,
the misunderstood, the unadorned, the
rejected and the discarded of materials for his
arrangements at a later time of the day, at the
times available to him, giving pride of place
the dignity and the respect deserving of all,
all creation.
Sofu Teshigahara, the founder of the Sogetsu
School in Japan in 1927 believed that ikebana
is an art and that the difference between
the Sogetsu School and ikebana lies in the
belief that once all the rules are learned and
the techniques mastered, an unbound field
remains for freer personal expression using
varied materials, not just flowers.
He never deviated from the basic principles
that distinguish ikebana from other forms of
floral art to grasp and express the feeling of
the material to express the third dimension
and asymmetrical balance. The concept that
was foremost in his teaching was that the
principles never change, but rather that the
form is always changing. His further belief
was that ikebana should be considered art, not
merely decoration and that it is for the entire
world.
Upon these insights one may perhaps come
to appreciate the works here of Patrick Lee
who has adopted “kado” the Japanese way
of flower to a very personal expression and
dimension of his christian faith, a catholic, in
the very arranging of flowers.
Patrick with an Umbrella After Late Breakfast in Peng Chau
A photograph by Lee Ka-sing. 16x20 inch gelatin silver print (1998)

Lee Ka-sing
Three Poems
(photographs and
Polaroids)

石 頭 記 。 懷 念 戴 天
Journal of a Stone.
In Memory of Dai-tin
(2021)
eight photographs

The Travelogue of a
Bitter Melon (2020)
eight vintage Polaroids

Fragments on a
Square Tabletop.
Father in Toronto
with us in 2019
(2022)
eleven photographs

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