MONDAY ARTPOST 0102-2023

MONDAY 

ARTPOST 

0102-2023 

ISSN1918-6991 

MONDAYARTPOST.COM 

Columns by Artists and Writers 

Bob Black / bq / Cem Turgay / 

Fiona Smyth / Gary Michael Dault 

/ Kai Chan / Kamelia Pezeshki/ 

Shelley Savor / Tamara Chatterjee 

/ Wilson Tsang / Yam Lau 

+ A Sunflower Memorandum 

(Gary Michael Dault) 

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

DOUBLE DOUBLE 

City Mirage Snow 

http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/cms.html 

The Painter The Photographer The Alchemist 

http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/ppa.html 

The galloping jelly pink horse with pea green 

spots 

http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/phgs.html 

Reality Irreality Augmented Reality 

http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/rar.html 

The Book The Reader The Keeper 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/09/dd202208.html 

Windmills Fields and Marina 

http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/07/wmf.html 

Island Peninsula Cape 

http://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/05/blog-post.html 

The Fence the Garden the Connoisseur 


Donkey camera and auld lang syne 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/02/ 

dd202202.html 

The Fountain the Shop the Rhythmic Train 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/01/ 

dd202201.html 

Hana Picnic Stones 


Terrain Little Red Riding Hood Rosetta 


Terrain Little Red Riding Hood Rosetta/ DOUBLE DOUBLE March edition 2022/ Kai Chan

Lee Ka-sing 

CODA (2020) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/coda.html 

Diary of a Sunflower, Book Two (2022) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/ds.html 

Eighty Two Photographs (2021) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/10/82p.html 

Time Machine (2021) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/12/tm.html 

Songs from the Acid-free Paper Box (2022) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/sa.html 

Songs from the Acid-free Paper Box 

Museum edition (2022) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/sab.html 

“That Afternoon” on Mubi, a dialogue: Tsai 

Ming Liang and Lee Kang-Sheng (2022) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/11/ta.html 

The Travelogue of a Bitter Melon (2022) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/11/tbm.html 

Swan House 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/swanhouse.html 

Time Machine/ Lee Ka-sing

Holly Lee 

Nine-Years (2020) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2020/02/ny.html 

DOUBLE DOUBLE Box in a Valise a closecropped 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2020/05/ddb-cc.html 

DOUBLE DOUBLE Box in a Valise on-site 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2020/05/ddb-os.html 

Gary Michael Dault 

Still Life Still A Book of Vessels (2022) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/09/bv.html 

The Book of The Poem (2022) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/08/bp.html 

The Nearby Faraway Small Paintings on 

Cardboard (2022) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/09/small-paintings-on-cardboard.html 

Time Machine (2021) photographs by Lee 

Ka-sing, Haiku by Gary Michael Dault 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/12/tm.html 

Istanbul Postcards (2021) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/07/ip.html 

Swan House (2021) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/12/swanhouse.html 

Six Poems (2022) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/11/6p.html 

The Air is like a Butterfly (2021) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/07/tab.html 

Still Life Still A Book of Vessels/ Gary Michael Dault

Calendar Beauty Vintage Calendar posters 

from China 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2020/03/cb.html 

Kai Chan 

Twenty Twenty An exhibition by Kai Chan 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/09/tt.html 

2K-4.0 (Kai Chan + Lee Ka-sing) 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/10/2k40.html 

Shelley Savor 

Mushrooms and Clouds but no Mushroom 

Clouds 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/09/mcmc.html 

Tomio Nitto 

The Diary of Wonders 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2021/10/dw.html 

Fiona Smyth 

CHEEZ 456 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/05/c456.html 

Libby Hague 

Libby Hague Watercolours 

https://books.oceanpounds.com/2022/11/lhw.html 

The Diary of Wonders/ Tomio Nitto

Caffeine Reveries 

Shelley Savor 

Watching the End of the Year Drift Away

Poem a Week 


Wet on the Snow 

high in 

a mountain 

a crumpled 

page 

lies wet 

on the snow 

its message 

dead 

from the dark 

in us

Travelling Palm 

Snapshots 

Tamara Chatterjee 

USA (November, 2000) – We left Las Vegas, 

spirits high with excitement looming as 

we drove closer to the desertscape we had 

envisioned and imagined for years. It never 

occurred to me that our passage of desert 

dreams would include several days of snow. 

We finally arrived in Zion; as the sky turned. 

The devastating winter flakes did indeed 

impede our jaunt into The Narrows, but what 

we did see was rather wondrous under a 

blanket of snow.

ProTesT 

Cem Turgay

ART LOGBOOK 

Holly Lee 

1. The «Turkestan Album» in color 

https://iada-art.org/hhhh/turkestan-album-in-color 

2. The Conquest of Central Asia through the Turkestan Album 

https://voicesoncentralasia.org/the-conquest-of-central-asia-through-the-turkestan-album/ 

3. «The Way» Film-portrait of the artist Askhat Akhmedyarov*, directed by Evgeny Lumpov 

(video 24:53) 

https://iada-art.org/hhhh/turkestan-album-in-color 

*Askhat Akhmedyarov was Born in 1965 in Uralsk, West Kazakhstan.

The Photograph 

coordinated by 

Kamelia Pezeshki 

Birdseye maple by Kamelia Pezeshki

Leaving Taichung 

Station 

Bob Black 

All poems move deathward 

so too our hearts, so too our homes 

so how to ask the shadow, 

the comfort of the day, the door in sprungtime, 

the contrition and calm of a muscular day when the wind is a wolf 

and your body, exposed to the late-in-coming December expiration, decibels and creaks, 

an old boat’s plank cuttles against the barnacles of the land’s desire 

your body etherized against the loss of the press once against your side, she 

scribbles in the margins scrambling for breath and meaning--. 

you will someday seek the comfort of these things surely: 

dusk’s dawning in spades and pried wide spaces left unlocked 

the chipped corners of winter’s building groped at 

whose voice chips away exhausted, 

a red blanket defiant and remaining, stitched up with poems 

those fearless verbs and unconjugated emotions: 

count all of them in your waiting and inside the questions, 

do not be afraid when fire falls from the sky. 

Voyage, Voyager 

“by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable 

and beautiful and possibly even 

unsuitable —….”--Mary Oliver 

“All plots tend to move deathward.”—DeLillo 

“не бояться, когда с неба падают пожары”—David Dector 

How to ask the shadow, 

when the moon comes barking, licking up and down the walls, 

the loom of the bedsheets caked up in the hip of the room’s corner 

the winter that brought you back from September 

that winter that brought you back from the nation’s fear 

all immaterial, ungoosed breath and a wintertide tongued toward the corner light, unchained 

let it all go 

let lee loaned lift 

let long away amid arear, a of all 

the sentences we wrote upon our wrists red and blue in the dark 

the clauses choked from the claustrophobia of a broken heart, grandmother once feared 

all these endless alphabets, the disdained alphas and the oneiric omegas 

all that mattered, once 

reimagined when you picked up the frozen stick in the creek, crawfishing backward 

and our life swam upstream for the first time, 

the pictographs that penciled our collar bones and inked the spines, 

the alphabet and algebra of the lives we voyaged from there to here, 

our passages and the passengers we once were, the glowering and the gathering

the flowers picked open with our canines and the maps incisored 

voyaged along the riverbank in Yilan— 

lavender, orchid, plum flowers, calla lilies and the daylilies upturned and drenched 

the stories speak of this life, the recipes left dry and brown in the tea tin in the red cupboard: 

so too our hearts 

a door in Springtime: 

so too of love 

so too of hearts 

so too the click of selves 

so too you 

so to you 

do not be afraid when love falls from the sky. 

So now 

how to ask again 

the shadow to seek and share what it knew, once 

of what you have seen and what has been taken away 

the children who climbed the emerald mountain by the baying sea: 

their conviction rang out amid the nightjars and swifts 

the remains and rickshaws along the old quarter’s street-- 

shall we count ourselves blessed 

among what remains, 

the tokens in the pockets, the coins in the seat’s sleeves, 

the reflections that muddied in the night of the street mirror, 

grandmother’s sprouting laugh, father’s cold sandwiches left aside on Christmas in wobby bar 

the stories gathered on the plates in the reservoir of the wine glasses late at night 

the welkin and distant laughter 

atop and amid the abiding-- 

neither stanza nor firmament have words for that, or for this 

the fishbones plucked from the filet set out for the cat, 

gawking amid winter, the light and listeners listless in their nocturnal unraveling 

organs of longing thawed, the last of your vows at night and the Earth’s orbit: 

so too the click of our selves 

so too you 

so to our hearts 

so to you 

do not be afraid when love fails from the sky. 

How to ask the shadow to cut away the wafer hurt, 

cut away the heart ache, the twinge left in the joint, 

loves ligature where the forlorn listens and the audience audits their languor 

their longing heeding lullaby and lament 


so too our hearts 

so too the click of our selves 

so too you 

so to you, then: 

how? 

To tell the shadow, this 

do not be afraid when all falls love from the sky, 

cut away the heart ache, cut away 

while a door in Springtime opens 

and all the poems come scattering, all language toward the deathward 

yet we remain 

far through the distance left, alive and liquid 

far through the distance left, alive 

the moon in the hinge of our hearts, 

the tree and the pen line forever loquacious in the snow. 

for: David Dector, Chiwan Choi and Robert Black, my father. 


so too of hearts

TANGENTS 

Wilson Tsang 

Ruth’s Raindrop

Open/Endedness 

bq 不清 

轉彎抹角 

BEAT AROUND THE BUSH 

他們說你仍需為你的所作所為 

投案 —— 那些錯置、胡言與 

亂語和美妙的邏輯謬誤發生於 

市郊這裡是為什麼陽光有其 

意義。我們皆是賦予別人的文物 

They say you are still wanted for the crime you 

Committed — those dislocations, mumbo 

Jumbos and beautiful logical fallacies that took 

Place here in the suburbs are why sunshine 

Means something. We are all artifacts for others. 

而這個早上 , 我們又一次以惹人歡喜的 

微笑溝通卻又同時相互誤解像 

誠懇和順理成章的成語。置於櫃中的記憶 

以我們獨有的坐姿與說話方式陳列 

而其口音就只有空氣中的氦氣能夠聽懂 

And this morning, we again communicated 

With pleasing smiles but misled each other like 

An honest eventual idiom. Cased memories are 

On display in ways we sat and talked, in 

Accents that only helium in the air understands. 

為什麼這些除了跟你和我們也 

息息相關呢 ? 河川蜿蜒如一條不持久的 

蛇吞噬沿途的植物與 

三文治。鬧劇與悲劇相遇的 

十字路口發生了意外 

我思 , 故我在 , 思考 

Why does this matter to not only you but 

All of us? The river meanders like an impermanent 

Snake swallowing plants and sandwiches 

Along its way. There is an accident at the 

Intersection, where farces and tragedies meet. 

I think, therefore I am, thinking.

Greenwood 

Kai Chan 

Study 

paper, wire

… 談笑間 … 

Yam Lau 

圓滿光華不磨瑩 , 掛在青天是我心 

- 寒山

CHEEZ 

Fiona Smyth

From the Notebooks 

(2010-2022) 


From the Notebooks, 2010-2023 

Number 160: An array of Recent Notebooks (with a slice of grand piano)

A Sunflower 

Memorandum 


Excerpted from DOUBLE DOUBLE 

December issue 2022

A Sunflower 

Memorandum 


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. 


December 30, 2022

Under the management of Ocean and Pounds 

Since 2008, INDEXG B&B have served curators, artists, 

art-admirers, collectors and professionals from different 

cities visiting and working in Toronto. 

INDEXG B&B 

48 Gladstone Avenue, Toronto 

Booking: 

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MONDAY ARTPOST 0102-2023

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