MONDAY ARTPOST 1128-2022

MONDAY
ARTPOST
1128-2022
ISSN1918-6991
MONDAYARTPOST.COM
Columns by Artists and Writers
Bob Black / bq / Cem Turgay /
Fiona Smyth / Gary Michael Dault
/ Holly Lee / Kai Chan / Kamelia
Pezeshki/ Shelley Savor / Tamara
Chatterjee / Wilson Tsang / Yam Lau
+ Picnic - essay and photographs
from Shan Hai Jin series (Holly Lee)
MONDAY ARTPOST published on Mondays. Columns by Artists and Writers. All Right Reserved. Published since 2002.
An Ocean and Pounds publication. ISSN 1918-6991. email to: mail@oceanpounds.com

TANGENTS
Wilson Tsang
The Veil

Open/Endedness
bq 不 清
致 未 來
ODE TO THE FUTURE
我 們 無 意 中 目 睹 了 一 場
必 然 的 日 落
在 殘 空 與 土 地 之 間 角 力 , 我
跟 你 以 一 塊 骨 頭 打 賭 , 那 隻 受 傷 的
孤 雁 的 性 別 。
By accident we witnessed a tussle where
The inevitable sundown
Struggled between the land and the waning sky. And I
Betted a bone on the gender of that wounded
Solitary wild goose.
野 外 的 飛 蟲 都 出 來 了 但 曾 經
對 火
感 到 好 奇 的 我 們
不 曾 詢 問 牠 們 白 天 的 心 思
究 竟 潛 藏 於 那 裡 。
Flying insects were all out but we
Who were once drawn
To fire
Never asked where their minds lurked
During the day.
日 出 也 是 必 然 的 。 自 始
我 清 楚 看 見 眼 前 的 藍 天
並 沒 有 祂 們 努 力 遊 說 我 們 的 星 宿 。
一 塊 大 石 睡 在 另
一 塊 大 石 上 令 我 能 夠 看 見 千 里 之 外 的 你 然 而 它 又 把 我 們 徹 底 隔 離 。
That sunrise was also inevitable. Since the beginning
I could clearly see that the blue sky before me
Didn’t have the stars that They tried hard to convince us of.
A boulder slept on top of
Another boulder allowing me to see you thousand miles away, yet
It also completely separated us.

CHEEZ
Fiona Smyth

ProTesT
Cem Turgay

ART LOGBOOK
Holly Lee
Nick Cave: Furthermore at the Guggenheim (Exhibition tour, YouTube 14.11)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZzYWcW5zpA
Nick Cave: Furthermore at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (video 5:36)
https://mcachicago.org/publications/video/2022/nick-cave-forothermore

Poem a Week
Gary Michael Dault
The Waters of the Afterlife
I swam
for an hour
in the waters
of the afterlife
the waves
were dry like
sandpaper
my skin
crackled
with discs
of salt
when I walked
back to shore
my footprints
ignited a chain
of small fires
across the sand

… 談 笑 間 …
Yam Lau

Caffeine Reveries
Shelley Savor
Night Guardian

Travelling Palm
Snapshots
Tamara Chatterjee
Madagascar (March, 2010) – On our walk
through the Anja Reserve; we did
not encounter traditional icons of god despite
the translation of the name, Anjanaharibe
means the “Place of the Great God.
Instead we did encounter several lemur
colonies, a variety of chameleons and a
multitude of flora. We climbed through the
nooks and crannies, along stone markers
and through grottos with dense foliage. Cacti
grew out of crevasses in the rocks; orchids
mixed among the grasses on the ground and
air ferns hung from the branches and trunks
of trees. What I remember most intensely
was the sensation of being watched; the Maki
are curious creatures, in terms of showcase
lemurs have the upper hand in voyeurism.

Leaving Taichung
Station
Bob Black
verdant dreams unbuckled, you uncluttering.
In
winter, a child bares beneath the snow and glaciated life
the damp light chirring toward a drowning glove, crushed beneath boot and ball,
as he pulls himself out of the wet world, broken into a frame of the cocktail’s Edwardtime,
and scampers through the woods
his father a ghost picking at a speakeasy’s rusted door,
the home’s window a square heart carved from crazed carpentry,
grandmother once an apparition who understood the agitated from the aggregate, love
blooming genome picked apart and ribboned,
our former life still cascading the mountain’s down:
the elder’s song and warning, morning digestion flies like a bird
and we once were, gone.
In
Spring, a night’s chrysolite hair lost amid the algae of the gutter,
the moon awakened as the clock rounds the bend of its homegoing,
and there, damp and lost, stood stools empty of body and shadow, our exited tales
firecrackers burned and left ash in their dying, dropped dragons droopy of their past--
Auntie promiscuously reading the world upside down,
once lost over a glass of Kaoliang and schnapps,
the mournings we survived,
the whale bone and the package that arrived in the front yard, the auspicious year,
Daddy’s ribs sing in the sand of the graveyard land
so you walked left out the door with a blackened hand
and the scooters ran wild and red in the dark cyan--
was it only us, was it?
Damp the Dream of Taipei
“…the mind has mountains. Cliffs of fall.”--Hopkins
“Morning digestion flies like a bird.”--Larry Fink
In
Autumn, rain ticks benumbed language along the fingers of Dadaocheng
stories gallop down the mountains as loosened earth
the divesting of the name you were once given in a doorway
bathed in green water from a blackened bowl, your teeth of the earth
and still tin in the late, an old man sits at a bar licking at peace and longing
bowed over the end, a brass coin slowing its spin down,
down the foliate rain spilling over the table as he winces
and clarity walks out the door,
life --
In
Summer, corners cool temperatures soften the exertion of thoughts ragged, you
but the wind an extra set of arms, picking the cotton from your arms
in the distance your grandmother stood beneath the Banyan tree, singing
toward the clouds and cicada, the scampering spiders upturned umbrellas
the sky exploding, the clap of a herd of pigeons taking the air in unison
pachyderms in wing, your heart song unfolding as expectation, still:
the sea and sky scar your voice as it grows verdant on the mountains of your grandmother’s dreams
disarmed, we remain this refrain.
In
Spring, once more coins fall and ring, the oolong brews high in the clouds of dew, my love
Komm du, du letzter
and all the loss dross, the tackle and porcelain and the losing
but then again on the horizon
come you.
For Wan-lin Yang, our Grandmothers and Larry Fink

The Photograph
coordinated by
Kamelia Pezeshki
One fine day by Joan Latchford, Canadian 1926 - 2017

From the Notebooks
(2010-2022)
Gary Michael Dault
From the Notebooks, 2010-2022
Number 155: Yellow Teapot, 2007 (from Still Life Still: A Book of Vessels, published in facsimile this year by
OCEAN POUNDS)

Greenwood
Kai Chan
Study
paper, wire

Order this duo-cover Exhibition Catalogue at BLURB
https://www.blurb.ca/b/11309704-2k-4-0
64 pages, 8.5x11 inch, paperback, CAD$35 each
[2K 4.0] the fourth collaborative exhibition by Kai Chan
and Lee Ka-sing. Exhibition runs thru December 10, 2022,
at 50 Gladstone Avenue artsalon, Toronto
(visit by appointment mail@oceanpounds.com)
(on wall) 16 works (Pairing) by Kai Chan
(on table) an artist book by Lee Ka-sing
View the artist book:
[Songs from the Acid-free Paper Box] (for Holly)
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/sab.html

Holly Lee
Picnic
Essay, and
photographs from
Shan Hai Jin series
山 海 經
An excerpt from DOUBLE DOUBLE
April edition 2022

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 made
marks on the same patches they are now standing on. I close my eyes; I roll back and
forth the office chair I am sitting on, 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 live, 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 -

A Picnic Day, BCE 250
(Trinity Bellwoods Park 2010)

A flock of gold-shedding birds flying past the woods
(High Park, 2010)

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