MONDAY ARTPOST 1219-2022

MONDAY
ARTPOST
1219-2022
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
+ A song is a painting is a
portrait is a prose (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

Greenwood
Kai Chan
Study
paper, wire

Poem a Week
Gary Michael Dault
Painters I like
I like a painter
whose fists
beat on the canvas
who cuts pigment
into slices
with a thumbnail
whose boots
are blackened with ink
who gets painted
into the spidery corners
of studio time
I like painters
perpetually seated in moonlight
always tyrannizing
their freshly laid eyes
I like painters
who refuse all help
who will piss
on a candle flame
give me a painter
who meanders like a thread
beneath the creaking
of the crepuscular sun

ART LOGBOOK
Holly Lee
Michael Heizer’s City
1. A city in the ocean of time
https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2022/08/16/essay-a-city-in-the-ocean-of-time/
2. After 50 years, Michael Heizer has finished his “City” in the desert
https://www.collater.al/en/michael-heizer-city-desert-nevada-design/
3. A mammoth artwork is born: Michael Heizer’s City opens in brutal Nevada desert after 50 years
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/aug/28/mammoth-artwork-michael-heizer-citynevada-desert
4. ATTEMPTING TO SKATE MICHAEL HEIZER’S MEGA SCULPTURE IN THE DESERT (video 6:39)
https://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2022/09/21/attempting-to-skate-michael-heizers-megasculpture-in-the-desert/
5. Archived news story from KSL.com: Huge, top-secret sculpture taking shape in desert (video
4:41)
https://www.ksl.com/article/32203469/huge-top-secret-sculpture-taking-shape-in-desert
6. What Do Native Artists Think of Michael Heizer’s New Land Art Work?
https://hyperallergic.com/763203/what-do-native-artists-think-of-michael-heizers-new-land-artwork/

… 談 笑 間 …
Yam Lau

Leaving Taichung
Station
Bob Black
The Cemetery for the Companionless
“You can call me a thief if you like, a thief of ceremonies”--Fleur Jaeggy
red lanterns sway upon the hip of night in guard of landlords who proffer unease and damp lungs
in search of firefly and candle and those who might be, forever her, hungry in the alley sway--
pictured and scampering and aflight,
you dug in and dug upon the bone rags of the city, crepuscular and carnal from lost peace
even-tiding the long lampposts, the barking pull of the food market stall for single evenings,
wet bones twig and stretch from window’s scratch, branches just so,
the twilight calligraphy kneels down next us and softens the soil, green with cadaver and lunglost
night,
their voices adrift, your rowing twilight
eddies and names a shoaded and spaded vein upon the hillside,
our ocean bed looking over the forlorn & foretold place, the poles of winter precarious in their
certainty
is it some graveyard singing
the chanting ocular and the disappearing gust along the rakes,
the life here in the high-browse corner of the city, our life a pandemonium of rust
the ghouls pandemic and the letters we marked red in the candlelight and our unsewed trust--
recall when your mother struck you and the sun went unglued, undiscussed.
now risen, the chaperoned evening unbuckles right, negotiated kettles of time and weeds upturned
a listing of a future nest, alright:
to rhyme the darkness with ringing, song and shell,
to grattle and grass the rattle between an elbow and the oxbow of concordant you
to rooftop the tarred city lights
to unshovel the world a kettle of ghosts, swaying and singing up barley brick
--the pail of all this going clanging against the cedar doors and slab block walls, rhyming the night
blue.

a turn of the clock and a porter held a brass box, face lock
oxidizing the stiff and the matter of the matrilineal
a pocket compass ticking the sky calendar and the city longitudinal and longing: the dead babies
the rambling cats in the dirt, the bottles tossed onto the sky, the secrets needled along the riverbank
the cacophony of oblivion tapped out in the orchestra of your heart and cobblestone feet:
there is no pronoun any longer shadowed by the lone tree
there is no pronoun any longer unkeyed
there is no pronoun any longer
there is no pronoun
there is no, any longer
behind us brevity, dissolution, cheer her at last,
the torn glove, the darkened skirt, the innervated boot and your verbs running release
an interlocking, blurrish enumerated vocabulary and we poured,
sinewy and artery and word puzzle,
all of us, some of you and a clove of me, together untackled and wettened,
poured out forever and into our some canine limitlessness--
a cemetery for the companionless.
yet their lives scribbled-up foam, a spew down from the body into a golem shaping
this inconvenient world and the alchemy and the algebra and the clocks of Middle Asia
our preternatural dipping and dampening, earth to worm and soil to ephemeral,
the divesting and the marriage of all we know and would become, swarming our-ward
you and I and all the rest, bedfellows and heaven’s crew, and ocean wrek
the outbreak of us downing and coming alive long after our bones and sinews into the sable
the indeterminate eternal sea.
for: Holly and Ka-sing Lee

The Photograph
coordinated by
Kamelia Pezeshki
Snowy Owl Hover, 2016 by Wendi Schneider
pigment ink on vellum over white gold leaf from the ’States of Grace’ series

Open/Endedness
bq 不 清
話 到 嘴 邊
TIP OF THE TONGUE
那 唯 一 一 次 沒 有 變
成 欠 缺 水 仙 花 的 蝴 蝶
你 也 決 定 了 下 贏
那 盤 海 戰 棋
That only time you turned
Into a butterfly without daffodils,
You also decided to win
That game of Battleship.
那 一 刻 , 一 切 都 在 你 的
腦 海 裡 發 生 , 然 後 落 到
紙 上 , 以 X 和 O 呈 現 ⋯⋯
一 大 堆 的 策 略
It’s all happening in your head
At that moment, then down
On paper, with the X’s and O’s…
All these strategies.
現 在 來 談 談 你 的 型 態 :
你 演 繹 臂 與 腿 的
方 式 正 像 那 種 葉 子
在 雨 中 懸 蕩 的 概 念 , 它
Now let’s talk about your form:
The way you articulate your arms
And legs is like the very notion of
Leaves dangling in the rain, which
反 映 了 我 們 對 必 然 性 謹 慎 的
寬 容 。 我 們 必 須 對 系 統
進 行 欺 詐 , 先 供 之 許 多 的
隱 喻 , 然 後 是 偽 科 學 的 數 據
Reflects our tolerance carefully
Toward certainty. We must cheat
The system by feeding it with many
Metaphors, then pseudoscientific data,
就 像 我 為 自 己 解 說 這 個 夢 的
方 式 。 它 涉 及 一 邊 捏 造 事 實
一 邊 離 開 前 往 新 的 日 出 , 而 在 那
一 個 新 的 字 詞 在 等 待
Like the way I explain this dream
To myself. It involves making stuff
Up as you move on to a new sunrise where
A new word awaits.

CHEEZ
Fiona Smyth

From the Notebooks
(2010-2022)
Gary Michael Dault
From the Notebooks, 2010-2022
Number 158: Still Life in Time of War (November 17, 2022)

TANGENTS
Wilson Tsang
Giant Wing

ProTesT
Cem Turgay

Caffeine Reveries
Shelley Savor
Festive Skating

Travelling Palm
Snapshots
Tamara Chatterjee
France (March, 2022) – Failure to validate
our program vouchers meant a change in
plan. Instead I wandered around enjoying
the blooming season amid the renovated
gardenscape surrounding Les Halles. I took
my time taking in the modernized plaza and
entry into the commercial centre, the vintage
construction now replaced by a glass and
metal canopy. The short interlude included
gazing at an effervescent queue, attempting
to discover their clone (Lego) figurine. ‘Twas
amusing to observe the lively expressions,
before taking off to rejoin the troupe.

Holly Lee
A song is a painting is
a portrait is a prose
(an essay)
89 • The Golden Lotus •
Footsteps of June
(selected photographs)
An excerpt from DOUBLE DOUBLE November issue 2022

A song is a painting is
a portrait is a prose
written by Holly Lee
From Barber to Agee to Evans
The first time I heard James Agee’s words were set to music, and sung by a soprano
with a beautiful voice. I didn’t know him then, and gradually get to know him a little
more. Not enough. Because of the music, the words and the poetry, I was driven to buy
his book A Death in the Family.
Agee’s rapturous prose-poem, Knoxville: Summer, 1915 was written in less than an
hour and a half, and on his revision, stayed 98 percent faithful to the original writing.
When I heard the music for the first time, I immediately fell for it. I was eager to
know, who’s the composer, who’s the lyricist, who performed it. It was Samuel Barber,
who set Agee’s Knoxville to music, and the version that I’d heard was sung by Renée
Fleming. Obviously, my knowledge in contemporary classical music is as limited as my
proficiency in 20th Century literature. But that doesn’t matter, I’ve become infatuated
by both composer and writer since.

Described as “lyric rhapsody” by Barber, he used about 1/3 of the prose-poem for
the score, conjuring up a 16-minute dramatic song for soprano and orchestra. There
is a universality of idyllic, nostalgic beauty in the work, that even for a person from
the Far East could grasp and resonate. The shortened prose set in lines was already
very impressive, but reading the original prose; I was enraptured with the free flow of
language, the meticulous observation of everyday life in amplified details, sentences
filled with humanity and purity of the heart.
On the bookshelf there is an old book I bought in the late eighties, which I rarely
touch, and remember only its approximate contents. It was about the Farm Security
Administration project; about some photographs taken by Walker Evans and text
written by James Agee—a documentation of the lives of three impoverished tenant
farmers during America’s Great Depression. I bring this up because, after some twenty
years, I finally picked up Walker Evans’s 650 pages biography and start reading. It
was from this point I remember the book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”, the book
I mentioned above. The book, with its photographs and text, left the world an indelible
impression on the poverty-stricken American South in the 30s. In it, I found a written
account of Agee by Evans. I was struck by its vividness and unconventional style of
writing, full of wit, beaming with life and personality. It is a “written” portrait of James
Agee. Walker Evans is not only a great photographer, he is unequivocally a brilliant
writer.
I could have ignored, and kept ignoring Agee’s prose and poetry, and Evans’s
photography, had I not been touched incidentally by Barber’s Knoxville. Music leads
to words, and words lead to imagery, which brings me back to writing. As I learn more
about Barber’s music, I’m impacted by his Adagio for Strings, which I have heard
before, but not knowing: it is one of the saddest compositions in contemporary classical
music.
The Original Sisters to The Golden Lotus
Anita Kunz acknowledged women of significance, known or unknown, with her brush
strokes. Recently she has created a substantial body of work, bringing illustrious
females front and centre to the printed page, naming the book “Original Sisters”.
Drawing one portrait a day, the two year lockdown period gave her plenty of quiet
time to focus on this project. Most characters in the series are long gone, and some
she was only made aware of from her friends. The way she portrayed the figures relied
mainly on public sources, and images she found on the Internet—very generic, and
generalized. With her experience and well-versed skill, she deftly picked up heat and
intensity of the individuals, modified and idealized with her personal touch.
In the portrait of Anna Akhmatova, she set her against a red background, her sharp
profile characterized by the nasal bump, and a fringe. Her hair is tied back into a
soft bun, a red bead necklace hung down her shoulders stressing their roundness by
the low-cut V-shaped dress. One can almost hear Akhmatova’s line: you will hear
thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms. Camille Claudel is another
beguiling portrait. The overall tone of the painting clings to an earthly brown. Her head
and shoulders are elongated; her hair unkempt, raining down in rings of frenzy; her
face is like porcelain, cracked and broken like her mental state, her intelligence and
virtuosity are reflected by the delicately painted French embroidered lace. After almost
close to a century, Camille Claudel’s sculptures are widely accepted, and proclaimed
as great as Rodin’s—her once teacher, mentor, and lover.
As Kunz celebrates the achievement of distinguished women in pictures, I contemplate
on the submissive roles Chinese women have endured over the centuries, ever more
feeling the privilege of living in a better, freer world of gender and racial equality. In
1989, I was invited to work on a multi-platform art project, which had incorporated
dance, performance, drama, music and photography. It was based loosely on the
Chinese classical novel: The Golden Lotus. The novel took place in the 12th century,
and encompassed many female characters, which made me think about the three-inch
golden lotus—the synonym for the bound feet of women. I proposed to take a suite
of portraits of the artists. Not deliberately, but out of subconsciousness, many of the
portraits I took possessed strong gestural bearings of the hands and feet.
When I was asked to participate in The Golden Lotus Project, the Tiananmen Square
protests had just started in China. My approach to the portrait series of the performers
and musicians was not meant to be direct interpretation of the characters in the book,
and the six weeks of protests in China ending in bloodshed perturbed me immensely. It
reflected clearly in my portrait of the musician Peter Suart. Suart, a young English lad
born in Hong Kong, was in Beijing during the incident. He was a first-hand witness

ut left the capital before the brutal crack down. We worked together on the idea of
the shot. In the shooting session, he wore the leather trench coat he bought in Beijing,
grabbing two spiky Indonesian musical instruments acting as sharp claws; he spread
his wings and soared like an eagle. The background was an old poem, composed and
made into woodcut by Ka-sing. The poem was about free will, and choice. Tea or
coffee. My title of the work echoed these thoughts. It came to be: 89 • The Golden
Lotus • Footsteps of June (1989) 八 九 • 金 瓶 梅 • 六 月 前 後 .
taking off my wartime garments. I’m putting on my old time wear. Gently, gently, I’m
releasing and combing my long-tangled hair. Before the mirror I stare, ornamenting my
brow with gold floral print cut in pairs. Stepping outside, I’m calling to my comrades.
Shocked and startled, not even my confidant recognizes me! Oh, my companions
for twelve long years. Listen to me, and look. Some distance away, among the thick
bushes, a male rabbit scurried north; a female rabbit looked vague and lost. Both
running, dear mates, are you able to tell if this one a buck, or that one a doe?”
Buck or Doe: The Ballad of Mulan 木 蘭 辭 , a re-imagination
She became a warrior by necessity, at a time when well water could not be mixed with
river water. She was that quiet water knitting from dawn to dusk; her sole music came
from her own breathing; her loom click click and click click.
A troubled, unrest heart. How was her old father to fight? The Khan was merciless;
soldiers were just numbers, recruited fast and perished fast. She would take up the
duty, cut her hair, bind her breasts, wear her boots, and head to the market. East to get
a fine stead; west, a saddle; south, a bridle, and north a long whip. Farewell farewell
my parents. By dusk I’d be resting by the Yellow River, another dusk on the black
mountains of Mongolia. Your calling became so feeble, I couldn’t bear to hear.
Ten thousand miles she rode and battled, swept through fields and mountain passes.
The north wind blew, the gong hit at midnight. Her armour shimmered under cold,
silvery light. For ten years she fought on countless battlefields, battered bodies laid
bare, and unsettled. For ten years, she combated and survived, returned gloriously,
kneeling to meet her emperor. On his high throne he offered her praise, high rank, and
gold. All these to her, were moon in the water, flower in the mirror. All she asked for
was a good horse, accompanying her in her toilsome journey, speeding her safely back
to her village; back to home, sweet home.
Postscript
In our age, most people associate Mulan as a Disney cartoon character of Asian origin,
a woman disguised as a man going to battle for his aging father. Mulan is a fictional
folk heroine from China’s Northern dynasties (Northern Wei, 386-534 AD), a time
when many famous Buddhist rock-cut cave temples were constructed at Yungang
and Longmen. Mulan is believed to be of Chinese/Xianbei ancestry (no bound feet!).
Mulan is perhaps even a tribal name, leaving the highly regarded heroine, like
many others, anonymous. But her brave deeds have survived and inspired people for
many centuries. The Ballad of Mulan is collected from oral traditions, transcribed
into written language, as a beautiful rhymed song. Though there are many English
translations of this ballad available on the Internet, I have the urge to re-imagining the
scene, and re-writing it in a prose form.
Her news of returning reached home faster than her feet. Her father, mother walked
out of the city arm-in arm. Her neighbours all came out to greet. Her sister rouged her
cheeks in rosy red; her brother whetted his knife for pigs and sheep.
Entering from east chamber door, settling on west chamber bed, she sings, “I’m

Mui Cheuk Yin 梅 卓 燕
performer

Peter Suart 彼 得 小 話
musician

Kung Chi Shing 龔 志 成 , Peter Suart 彼 得 小 話
musicians

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