City Mirage Snow

Double Double 2022-12

DOUBLE DOUBLE 2022-12
City Mirage Snow
A Holly Lee and Lee Ka-sing Publication
First published in Canada by OCEAN POUNDS
December 2022
ISBN: 978-1-989845-56-1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Photography, Visual Art, Poetry, Literature, Culture
Authors: Lee Ka-sing, Holly Lee, Gary Michael Dault,
anothermountainman
Copyright © Ocean Pounds 2022
Individual Copyrights belong to the Artists and Writers.
All Rights Reserved.
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from this book, please write to mail@oceanpounds.com
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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).
City Mirage Snow
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Front cover image: anothermountainman
Back cover and lead-in pages: Lee Ka-sing
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Lee Ka-sing
a poem, two episodes
CODA (2020) Diary of a
Sunflower, Book Two (2022)
Seeing CODA (Holly Lee)
A Sunflower Memorandum
(Gary Michael Dault)
Lead-in pages: Fragments from
Diary of a Sunflower, Book Two
(Lee Ka-sing)

Seeing CODA
Holly Lee
When Ka-sing started to gather vocabularies from his past photographs, to compile and
portray a hefty volume of poetic images dedicated to Hong Kong, I was curious about
the weight of the project. Taking into consideration the present antagonistic climate
there, it would be, undoubtedly, not toward the light.
He calls it CODA, a visual poem.
CODA is a piece of original work in the format of a book by Lee Ka-sing (2020), inclusive of 227 photographs
in sequence. Published by OCEAN POUNDS in 2020, 480 pages, 8x10 inch, soft cover, and was released in
both paperback and ebook editions. More information about the book visit this link -
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/coda.html
CODA has a colour, or two. The word, first of all, is assigned the Pantone colour of a
slight reddish–the lighter grey 409. Actually, I would hesitate between 409 and the
deeper grey 410. I cannot pinpoint the exact hue because colours look inconsistent
under different light sources. I am now sitting underneath a narrow, long bank of
LEDs, which gives out a warm yellowish light. When I walk over to the big window,
greeting the large amount of daylight flooding in, I might have to choose another
number of grey, say 431. If we move on to consider the next part; the background
colour, where the alphabets CODA are set upon, I would call it a very dull dark blue.
How dull? The Pantone 539? No, it looks too primary. I would perhaps mix a slightly
purplish-blue 2965 with a medium grey 430. Again all these are just to give you an

idea of the cover design of the book Ka-sing calls CODA, which by this time, you
might have reached a conclusion–a sense of no matter how free-flowing and open the
work seems to be, still contains sentiments of fairly unbearable weight.
Ka-sing is the kind of person who talks little, but stays in focus. He could listen
to Beethoven’s symphonies many times over without being bored. When I raised a
surprise look at him still listening to the same play list he picked up weeks ago, he
would say, “This is a version by another conductor, a different orchestra.” I agree that
he will always find something new, or a different interpretation in the same piece of
music, but I also believe the emotion, rhythm, ebb and flow in the musical language
ought to have played an important role in influencing his vision, paving him the way
to compose the work. His photographs are beyond a single shot, or thought. CODA is
an unabbreviated visual experience; a tonal narrative, a sensorial form, a symphonic
poem that one listens with the eyes.
I had an indescribable feeling, almost overwhelmed with emotions when I first
saw CODA on the computer screen. A body of 227 images, set in a slow-moving
temple which would take about 20 minutes to sit through. A meditation. Slowing
down of a hurried life. For certain, having sat patiently and gone through the twenty
minutes visual epic, one could have felt, or been touched by one thing or the
other. Despite vastly different in context, some images are always more universally
understood and resonant with than others. That’s the beauty of the work. You cannot
help but echo with some of the images you’re drawn to. There is a sense of familiarity,
something long hidden in the secret corners of the mind prompting and luring you into
their shadows…
The first image in CODA is a stunning, fuzzy impressionistic black and white shot from
Kowloon overlooking to Hong Kong Island–vaguely visible as mountains of lights. It
starts with the celebration of the first night after the 1997 Handover in July. A night
drizzling with light rain but nevertheless fireworks were still shooting off to light up
the sky. The action was spontaneous, the photographer a wandering soul, following and
searching for the moods of the city. The image is elusive and faintly volatile, pulses
up and down with the photographer’s heartbeat. Following promptly is an image of a
(opposite page) upper: the first photograph in CODA, below: the end shot

melt-down clock, which haunts me immediately as an object found after explosion.
The pursuing page shows a whirlwind, follow suit by a quiet round object with pencil
marks, then, a wreath of barbed wire twirled in the air, like a crown of thorns. The
poetics of the images are so strong; a labyrinth of hope and despair, we are led, one
page after another, into the dark woods. One moment quiet and gentle, next, complex,
dense and impenetrable.
Flipping the pages further, we’re ushered in pictures showing old, rephotographed
negatives, perforated film strips that recorded images visually (and mentally) invoke
sound vibrations striking out from different cords. After pages of texturing and layering
we are slowly entering Hong Kong life in the 80s and 90s, the rose garden, memories
of the lives of glamorous celebrities and common folks, arrows always asking the
question come or go, this way or that way. And, trailing behind so many staircases,
steps, writings and layering of events, the city comes to reveal itself–a wet football
field, skyscrapers, trees, roads, grids in myriad forms. Sometimes it feels like a prison
one needs to break out. But there are more knotted roots, more entangled wires and
obstacles. Is that the state of mind of the artist?
Perhaps it means what it means. CODA is a soft sigh exhaled gently to something past.
A good-bye (again) to a close friend Ping-Kwan and the city they both left behind.
It is a dialogue and a funeral song–something that’s so frequently heard in Mahler’s
symphonies. The famous Adagietto in his Fifth, a love song replete with the yearnings
of living and the inevitability of having to walk away. In making CODA, Ka-sing
deliberately converted most of the colour photographs into black and white, with just
a few exceptions–the colours he still sees and ingrained in his memory. The colour
photograph “I promise you a rose garden” was an editorial assignment created for a
magazine in Hong Kong in 1990. Seven years before heading back to the hands of
China, the city was full of optimism and a number of mega constructions were being
proposed. They called it the Rose Garden Project. The future looked rosy, thus the title
Ka-sing gave to his picture, not without skepticism. Today we are still intrigued by the
thought and the photograph. The sky has already turned grey; the promise, like the
magnificent, breathtaking cloudscape, is but a fleeting scene flying past the window of
an aeroplane.
after the plane took off. Or, perhaps he was suggesting more? Forty years later,
Ka-sing responded with CODA, his jolts of feelings are largely expressed
through images; his love and memories of the city, the melancholic departure,
linger like a slow, at times turbulent tune that keeps looping itself–a mirage of
desire, a smoke screen to despair. This city, often considered as a city in transit,
has become indispensable; growing deeper roots, taking permanent residence in
the heart. Yet, CODA is not a conclusive chapter, it is a book made after another
book in the same year*. The end shot is a small Big Bang. The ending is another
beginning.
December 2021
*Lee Ka-sing’s domestic-life-colour-book was made prior to CODA. It was made
during the lockdown months of Covid in 2020 (with touches of optimism and
a lot of colours). Unlike CODA, which recycled old images, all 227 images in
domestic-life-colour-book were new. The book has 480 pages, the same number
of pages and images as in CODA. Ka-sing calls the two books a duo.
Can you live in the clouds, beautiful as it is, asked Ping-Kwan in his poem. Ping-Kwan
was thinking about temporal, terrestrial and earthly matters at the time when he wrote
the poem in 1981. He was seeing his city distancing, disappearing under the clouds

A Sunflower
Memorandum
Gary Michael Dault
I was raised long ago in this earthly place,
But I do not care for my home.
I owe my very life to its bountiful moisture,
But the earth is not my sky.
----Muhammad Iqbal (translated from the Urdu by Mustansir Mir)
Here is the Sunflower or Helianthus Annuus: “helios” (sun) plus “anthos” (flower)
plus “annuus” (annual).
Diary of a Sunflower, Book Two is a piece of original work in the format of a book by Lee Ka-sing (2022),
inclusive of 176 photographs in sequence. Published by OCEAN POUNDS in 2022, 372 pages, 8x10 inch, hard
cover, and was released in both paperback and ebook editions. More information about the book visit this link -
https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/ds.html
The dry, attenuated almost plaintive lyricism of the sunflower, the noble-grotty
heliotropic sunflower (in that its flower its always facing the sun), its rudimentary
petals, powdery with a light-scooping, moisture-holding, almost monastic attentiveness
required to nurture, develop and enshrine its payload of close-packed, geodesically
arranged seeds of shining jet, lends the plant a more-than-usual protective, almost
maternal quality.

The plant’s relentlessly tall, rather rough-hewn stalk and its hairy, primordial leaves
seem unceasingly dedicated to the focused production and protection of this glistening
seed-bed core at the heart of each flower (called the plant’s “chapter”), its powerful
engine of perpetuity.
What of the sunflower’s look? Is the sunflower’s vigorous roughness and raggedness
the result of its three-metre quest for extraordinary height—in its search for ever
more light and ever more air? Is the plant coarsened by a weariness earned in the
fulfilment of its elaborate botanical program (fecund all the time)? Does a sunflower
ultimately begrudge its own skyscraper growth? Does it inevitably grow leggy and
emptied in the course of carefully generating the florets on its flattened central
receptacle and is it poignantly post-partum in the demanding production of its throng
of shiny black seeds—which are actually small dry fruits, apparently referred to as
“pipes”? Certainly, much is expected of the sunflower.
The sunflower keeps working hours. It is, for example, diurnal. That is to say,
it springs to vigorous botanical life during the day and, exhausted, grows gratefully
somnolent at night. Just like the rest of us.
Lee Ka-sing’s book, Diary of a Sunflower, Book Two, is beautiful and relentless,
attributes not often found together. The book is not a taxonomy, nor a life-cycle, nor
a mere progression of images. Ka-sing describes the book simply as “176 photos in
sequence.” But a sequence is not (or need not be) a narrative, not a life-story.
For me, Diary of a Sunflower is virtuoso work of photo-conceptualism, a protracted
stutter of still lifes that claims meaning—eloquent meaning—from repetition and
accumulation and, in the course of that amassing, repeatedly offer, from photo to photo,
subtle differences, tonal variants, the rustle of sub-events and nudging revelations.
The book is an essay, in the original sense of “essayer,” to try, to attempt.
Like many works of tireless, insinuating anatomization of a subject, nothing much
really seems to happen—at least not quickly or obviously: in the beginning there is
the flower, with its ragged, upstart petals. Sometimes the blossom hangs down, like
a sigh (p.16). Occasionally, the blossom is partly cradled in (and semi-occluded by)
a shrouding, protective leaf (p.52). Some of the photographs (p.58) are All Leaf and
nothing else. Page 144 offers a view of the sunflower in a sort of swoon or dying fall,
whereas, in contrast, p.158 gives the giant blossom the sudden, incoming power of a
fiery asteroid hurtling to earth. By p.220, there are serpentine stems and bulky leaves
weaving together into a bulwark of fortress growth, while suddenly, on p. 252, there a
momentary, inexplicable blackout—in which the mighty flower now hangs down into
the photograph as a silhouette—as if someone had pulled a plug.
But then a suite of brisk, steadfast blossoms follows (p.253ff), ending the book:
all passion spent, all faith restored, the seed-entrenched blooms baked, crisped,
windswept, the sunflower’s essential, eternalizing story.
In William Blake’s famous poem, “Ah! Sun-flower” (from his Songs of Experience,
1794), the rather Christ-like, sacrificial plant is “weary of time” and “countest the
steps of the sun,” its whole wracked being seeking “that sweet golden clime” where
“the traveler’s journey” comes finally to its end and finds fulfilment.
The other great sunflower poem is Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” from 1955.
In Ginsberg’s poem, the sunflower is a wreck: “…corolla of bleary spikes pushed
down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-betoothless
mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire
spiderweb, leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust
root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear, Unholy
battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!....”
This is unforgettable writing, but Ginsberg’s betrayed, industrially-compromised
sunflower remains as remote from Lee Ka-sing’s as Blake’s touchingly martyred plant
is.
The sunflower of Ka-sing’s Diary of a Sunflower is neither protagonist nor victim.
Therein lies its majesty. The plant’s meaning comes in the fullness of time—like
breathing.
Gary Michael Dault
December 30, 2022

anothermountainman
hong kong walk on
hong kong walk on: a collaboration
between Tai Ping Carpets and
anothermountainman. Employing
the iconic red white blue colours
to construct two one-of-a-kind 3
metre x 6 metre handmade carpets.
Both pieces were unveiled at Art
Basel Hong Kong, in May 2022.
Photographs on the following pages,
by anothermountainman, featuring
the hong kong walk on #1, taken in
various locations of Hong Kong.
(images left to right: hong kong walk on
#1, hong kong walk on #2)
hong kong walk on
for everything in life
there is no
clear start point
and there will be no
absolute ending
it’s a journey of
straight and winding
smooth and rugged
same for everything
same for our city
anothermountainman
palms together
/ 2022

anothermountainman
i see mountains.
they are mountains.
i see mountains. they are mountains.
anothermountainman / 1990-2022
anothermountainman’s photo series on
‘mountains’ is not referring to real mountains,
but a collection of his over hundred photos taken in the city,
capturing water marks on wall, wire fence, wood bench,
plastic water hose, electrical wires and rusted metal plate...
in the new normal of covid-19,
people are adjusting the pace of living,
living invert rather than going out,
we got to have a peace-of-mind in the heart, to enjoy the world,
no matter what constraints and hurdles we are facing.

anothermountainman
words talking.
self talking.
10 silkscreens

how are you today
35”x47”, silk screen painting on red-white-blue fabric, 1/1

stage
35”x47”, silk screen painting on red-white-blue fabric, 1/1

elieve
35”x47”, silk screen painting on red-white-blue fabric, 1/1

truth
35”x47”, silk screen painting on red-white-blue fabric, 1/1

god is everywhere
35”x47”, silk screen painting on red-white-blue fabric, 1/1

phenomenon
35”x47”, silk screen painting on red-white-blue fabric, 1/1

hong kong _ your home
35”x47”, silk screen painting on red-white-blue fabric, 1/1

to retrieve _ no goodbye
35”x47”, silk screen painting on red-white-blue fabric, 1/1

open the gate
35”x47”, silk screen painting on red-white-blue fabric, 1/1

Born in 1960, Stanley Wong ping-pui, better known as anothermountainman on
the art scene, is a renowned designer and contemporary artist based in Hong Kong.
As an artist, Wong is passionate in photography, and various creative mediums
focusing strongly on social issues. Over the past two decades, Wong gained
international awareness with his ‘red, white and blue’ series that promotes the
‘positive spirit of Hong Kong’. In 2005, he represented Hong Kong at the 51st
Venice Biennale. Over the years, anothermoutainman has involved in many cross
culture projects. Most recently, in The Hong Kong House at the Echigo-Tsumari
Art Triennale 2022, he has created three thematic works based on nature. Another
prominent work is a collaboration project with Tai Ping Carpets, titled “hong kong
walk on”, which premiered at Art Basel Hong Kong in May, 2022. The latter project
granted him the HKDC DFA Grand Award (2022).
In 2011, Wong was named the Artist of the Year in the Hong Kong Arts
Development Awards, and received the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Awards 2012
from the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Many of his works have been exhibited in local
and overseas galleries and museums. He had a solo show in Tokyo ggg in 2015,
and a full scale exhibition “TIME WILL TELL / anothermountainman x stanley
wong / 40 years of work” at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum in 2019. His work is
in public collections including M+ Hong Kong and the V&A Museum in London.
Currently his solo exhibition is on view at Lucie Chang Fine Arts in Hong Kong.
Along his career in the creative field, Wong has won over 600 international awards,
including golds at One Show from the U.S., D&AD Yellow Pencil from UK and TDC
Award in Tokyo. In 2007 he established 84000communications to advance even
further his multi channels creative career. In 2020, Stanley Wong was named DFA
World’s Outstanding Chinese Designer.
graffiti not prohibited
35”x47”, silk screen painting on red-white-blue fabric, 1/1

Holly Lee
Something
about Portraits
In three segments

Six portraits
(1993)
For the most of us who were born around the fifties, the nineties in Hong Kong were the
best of times. While worrying about the climate of the city’s future, people, inevitably
had to move on. Everything was in motion; everybody worked enthusiastically toward
identifying one thing or the other; Chinese, Hong Kongese, pre-colonial, post-colonial,
and the degree of Britishness affecting and intervening ordinary people’s lives. For a
moment, we did have a cultural identity crisis, and many cultural projects produced
around that period reflected just that issue–who we were, and how we could identify
ourselves as the people of Hong Kong. In 1993, I was invited to work on the third
phase of a project curated and directed by Wong Wo Bik, namely A Metropolis: Visual
Research into Contemporary Hong Kong 1990-1996. My contribution to the project
was to take portraits of selected artists from different areas. Basically, we knew each
other well because there weren’t many working in the arts then and it was a small
and tight-knit circle. However, these artists represented certain aspects of Hong
Kong activities and creativity in the nineties, and were among the best in the field. I
photographed Mui Cheuk-Yin (choreographer/dancer); Zunzi (political caricaturist);
William Tang (fashion designer); Yank Wong (painter); Tong King-Sum (sculptor), and
Sunny Pang (dancer/choreographer). A little while ago, in the course of organizing
some old pictures, I came across these six prints again, but found the portrait of Sunny
Pang missing. But somewhere, I located that test strip. As a matter of fact, this series
of portraits had never been officially exhibited. The 8x10 prints that I found, and on
view here, were work prints for the publication documenting the Metropolis project–a
book published in 1996 chronicling the face of Hong Kong in the nineties by over
thirty photographers.

Mui Cheuk-Yin 梅 卓 燕
(Dancer, Choreographer)

Sunny Pang 彭 錦 耀
(Dancer, Choreographer, Performing artist)

William Tang 鄧 達 智
(Fashion Designer, writer)

Tong King-Sum 唐 景 森
(Sculptor)

Yank Wong 黃 仁 逵
(Painter)

Zunzi 尊 子
(Caricaturist)

The Shades of Portraits
Second Erasure
I took a portrait of Hong Kong once. A view of the city harbour at the end of the 20th
Century, with a Bauhinia in front of the splendid view. This particular flower, known
commonly as the Hong Kong Orchid Tree, Bauhinia Blakeana; the floral emblem of
the city, is an accidental hybrid discovered on the seashore in Hong Kong in 1908,
and named after Sir Henry Blake, the Governor of Hong Kong who ruled from 1898 to
1903. I did the portrait of Hong Kong a year before I left the city of my birth, in 1996.
When I think of Hong Kong now, it would be an evening portrait; a harbour jampacked
with crystal pillars; black clouds rolling in, carrying a whopping mass of
rain, threatening to wash down and flood the city below. When I think of home,
the thought always leads me back to childhood, jumps briefly to my teens (which I
remember vaguely), over to a period when I started working, fast forward to my career
in photography with Ka-sing, our family lives and the many hideous moving lives from
one apartment to another, though often in proximity. This city is a small big city; by the
time I left, it had a population of 6.5 million. After twenty three years, in 2020, it has
added another staggering million. I remember the life I led before I left, but it too, is
ebbing away. However, that memory is only present for me–the one who keeps it locked
inside the drawer; after all, that world has moved on, progressed, and transformed
into an another existence. There are difficulties in comprehending its evolving slang,
gestures, life, art, culture, and communication of all sorts. In short, I am just this
person of an era that has passed, a period forgotten and gradually, erased. My heart is
evermore laden today. Twenty-some years after my departure, despite being successful,
robust and brimming with luxuriant growth, my small big city still cannot be saved
from repression and subjugation. The city is still largely in denial, but the gradual
realization of the sad fact has already sunken in, and created vacuums for countless
activities. The recent implementation of autocracy inevitably speeds up the removal
of an autonomous society; it leads also, ironically, to the erasure of the twenty or so
opulent years after 1997.

The Snow White Queen 白 雪 仙
I was born in the days when culture and tradition were still strong in Hong Kong,
this included many colourful festivals, folk arts and performances, and most of all–
my beloved Cantonese opera. Since the 50s, Yam Kim-Fai and Bak Suet-Sin, both
Cantonese opera performers, partnered and rose to stardom. Yam always played
the cross-dressing principal male role known as ‘Man Mou Sang’, a scholar or a
fighting hero; and Bak Suet-Sin played the female role of Hua Dan, the maiden. The
pair worked together on stage, and later on big screens, with love stories usually
ended in tragedies, fairly similar to Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Isolde in Western
operas. I can still remember, very vividly, a scene from their opera “The Revival of the
Red Plum” ( 再 世 紅 梅 記 ), in which Bak Suet-Sin acting as a fair maiden presumedly
dead, rose from the coffin. The atmosphere was ghastly, her sharp singing/wailing was
chilling to the bone. Yet splendid theatre it was and stuck with me for the rest of my
life. That year, probably 1968 or 69 when I was around 15 or 16, my aunt took me to
the Lee Theatre to watch this opera–it was the only live opera I had seen Yam and Bak
performed. This charismatic, incredibly talented and inseparable couple, yin-yin in
real life, and yin-yang on stage, had created an image of the perfect lovers with such
spellbinding beauty and aura, that continues to infatuate and live in the collective
memories of the Hong Kong people today. Bak Suet-Sin is now 94, and Yam Kim-Fai
would have been 107. The heavenly couple broke apart when Yam died in 1989.
have been a disappointment to some people I photographed back then. I got into the
profession by accident, always wondering if I had the talent, or skill to settle in at
that rank. Questions on the notions of “beauty”; how to attain that quality, take the
portrait I like, and still be savoured by the sitter at the same time–still baffle me today.
Outstanding photographers like Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz know their trade
very well. They would set up certain parameters, either work within the frame structure
of a limbo background, or guide the sitters through the session in preconceived sets.
The result is always under control. Once broken out of that shooting paradigm, free
wheeling becomes free roaming, which means more difficulty for both parties to find
that meeting point. Most of the time, I feel awkward photographing people I know well,
or am too familiar with. Being too aware of their temperament, I would try not to overdirect
them. Perhaps it is exactly the lack of direction that causes my setback at this
side of the camera. Between us, there is always that ineffable, obscure space.
A disquieted thought
In 1996, I could not believe myself, when I had the opportunity to photograph Bak
Suet-Sin–the Snow White Queen. The opportunity, however turned into a disappointed
act, as my photographs seemed not pleasing enough, and her close friend and agent
had not shown any enthusiasm, nor interest to print them. These images were stashed
away in folders for many years. Perhaps the assignment was too challenging. I strived
to create my best shots but was timid at the time to cross the line. I was never able to
get close, to feel at ease, or make her feel comfortable. Or was that image, fine as I am
looking at it now, simply not up to her Goddess standard? I set aside the black and
white photographs and all my questions, but couldn’t refrain to go back to them from
time to time.
In my early days in Hong Kong, regarded as a “people” photographer, I think I might
On beauty, and Eyes Wide Open
External beauty and internal beauty; we are carrying both temperaments, showing
that in every move of our lives. That quality is hardly visible and moves so fluidly,
that it is hard to capture in photography. Another imminent question is: can beauty be
measured, decided or even scrutinized by age? Do you grow wiser and more appealing
every day or simply wither with the years? Could the wrinkles on your face, that make
you look like a wilted orange, reflect the vigorous spirit at heart? Older people are
more reluctant to have their portraits taken, fearing the honesty of the camera revealing
too finely their time-ravaged faces, dodging the inward beauty that glows with age. The
great portrait photographer, here I am referring to Richard Avedon again, would have
no difficulty in persuading, or reminding senior sitters to reveal that inward quality,

acting with self-assurance, charging back gallantly at the photographer; eye to eye. His
large format camera would mercilessly reveal all the fault lines on their dreary faces,
eyes made tired and lustreless over the years, subjecting them all to open study and
ruthless scrutiny. These wondrous people; the courage and beauty of revealing their
experience and wisdom of a lifetime so confidently, with eyes wide open.
Eyes Wide Shut
No, never a single portrait could adequately represent a person. Eyes represent human
emotions and thoughts, and almost no one would accept a picture with eyes closed.
One would then raise the question of why are there so many portraits of famous people
captured with eyes closed? Avedon’s Ezra Pound, Irving Penn’s Truman Capote,
Horst P. Horst’s Salvador Dali, Martin Schoeller’s Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Chris
Floyd’s Paul McCartney, Clive Arrowsmith’s Dalai Lama, Philip Montgomery’s Martin
Scorsese, and Michael Avedon, the grandson of Richard Avedon, photographed Jonas
Mekas, Warren Ellis, Ishmael Reed and John Lewis all with their eyes shut; giving the
viewer a sense of all doors closed. Could it be the photographer’s idea or the sitter’s
idea? Or is it a way to escape? By avoiding eye contact, things become indecipherable;
things go deeper, leave it to the viewer’s imagination. The portrait becomes a selfportrait
of the sitter entering a state of trance, drenched in irreality and a transcendent
state. It is far more perplexing than refusing to communicate. The impossibility to
relate a full life in one single frame. Closing the eyes is a way to release the pressure,
to simply let everything go. Nothingness, eyes wide shut; to reach a state of nirvana, to
be free from entangled roots, to be free from the sense of self–even for a brief moment
of time.
career. To me, it’s a marker of memory stretching from my teens to adolescence.
Perhaps, as I am reflecting now, my portrait of Bak is fine. The only failure is my
subconscious mind refusing the demise of that “idyllic” image, to bring it to closure, to
let it go.
There’s another “idyllic” image I still couldn’t let it go, and perhaps never could. The
“idyllic” image of what my small big city once was. They say time is the best medicine,
and in time, all openings, all wounds, will be closed; memories no longer haunt and
pain. Yet my city is not getting any nearer to that somewhere over the rainbow. The
great whitewash, the closing of more doors, losing all the colours attaining to the city’s
past, and the many shades in between. What will the colour be in my next portrait of
Hong Kong, I wonder. Will it be the colour of Bauhinia, the bright pinkish purple; or
dim gray, a colour that describes my heart as it is now, a shade that appears closer to
the lower end of the achromatic value scale. Or, will it be just another unsettled
portrait–one that I cannot simply capture as a photograph. It exists only in the mind,
amorphous and cloudy, at certain points, lemon drops and bluebirds song.
August 2020
A colour question
In her recent public photographs, Bak Suet-Sin no longer wears tinted glasses.
She has, perhaps, at the age of 94, gotten closer to a state of profound peace and
happiness–a state nearing Nirvana. Her diva image, which had been ingrained in my
mind since a child, was but an idyllic image, non-existing, and no matter how hard
I tried, could never be recreated. In my quiet down mind, the portrait I took of Bak
twenty four years ago, was just a glimpse of her legendary, polychromatic life in neutral
black-and-white, some less-fanciful trimmings embellishing her long and colourful

Family portrait in four
large format negatives
(taken around 1990-91)
I have just read a statement by my artist friend Rupen on his own work. Intrigued
by his idea of sequential and chance formations, I re-examine my photographs,
taken with an 8x10 Sinar P in the early nineties–four black and white negatives that
were defectively developed, and had scarcely made their way to the positive side
of the light, that I’d kept inside the now dented, slightly deformed blue box marked
“Oriental Photo Paper”–a colour RPIII printing paper developed by the Japanese.
While my friend’s recent work is “visually distilled”, treading toward to “redefine the
Post minimalist, monochromatic and conceptual art practice”, my poorly developed
negatives–I tease myself, might adopt the idea of chance formations to transcend their
aesthetic value, an act not uncommon in recent photographic history, such as Man Ray
and his Rayograph. By mistake he found solarisation in the darkroom, thus realizing
and using it to escape from calamity. In the same vein, I could also evade mistakes
made in the darkroom and satisfy myself with the “accidental beauty” those images
give me. The more I look, the more I enjoy the flaws; damages done to the negatives are
no longer eyesores but have become, lately, new elements, new additions to enhance
my family portraits. What’s more, it reminds me that an image is constituted by at
least two complementary aspects: the positive side, which most of us can see, and the
negative part, the majority of us have lost our seeing ability.

Family portrait: Ka-sing, Iris and Holly

Family portrait: Holly

Family portrait: Iris and Holly

Family portrait: Iris
(following page) a positive image digitally reversed from the negative