TERRAIN, The Complete Twenty-Volume Edition

 TERRAIN is a collaborative project that began in 2022. Throughout the project, Lee Ka-sing regularly sent Gary Michael Dault photographs selected from his archive, and Gary responded with newly written haiku. The exchange was intended to be daily whenever possible, unfolding as an ongoing conversation between image and poem. Each volume consists of fifty photograph-haiku diptychs. The project culminates in this complete twenty-volume edition, published by OCEAN POUNDS in August 2026.

Several volumes were shaped through distinct thematic approaches. Volume Five, fragments from Istanbul Journal, draws upon photographs made during a journey by Ka-sing, Holly, and Kai. Volume Ten presents a suite of photographs taken during Ka-sing and Holly’s visit to Gary’s Swan House in Napanee in December 2019. Volume Eleven was created in memory of Holly Lee following her passing; Gary wrote a sequence of tribute haiku, accompanied by photographs from Ka-sing’s visual elegy, An Elegy. Volume Thirteen, Journal: Time Present and Time Past, is based on photographs made between 2017 and 2018 in Ka-sing’s third-floor living quarters before he moved to the former gallery space that transformed into a home. Its companion, Volume Fourteen, serves as a poetic photographic document of the gallery transformation. Volume Sixteen draws from Objects and Traces, a series of fifty objects rooted in personal memory. Volume Nineteen consists of photographs re-photographed from Ka-sing’s early black-and-white negatives. For Volume Twenty, the concluding volume, the collaboration reversed its usual process: Gary completed fifty haiku first, and Ka-sing responded by composing a photographic sequence in multiple movements.

Gary Michael Dault is a Canadian writer, poet, painter, and art critic. He is the author of numerous books on visual art and poetry and has written extensively for magazines, newspapers, exhibition catalogues, and broadcast media. For fourteen years he wrote the visual arts column Gallery-Going for The Globe and Mail. He has exhibited his paintings widely and has been a regular contributor to Monday ARTPOST for more than a decade.

Lee Ka-sing is a photo-based artist whose career began in Hong Kong in the late 1970s. Together with his lifelong creative partner Holly Lee, he developed a practice informed by both literature and photography. He was a founder of the poetry journal QIU YING and the photography journal DISLOCATION. He received the Hong Kong Artists’ Guild’s Artist of the Year Award in 1989 and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s Fellowship for Artistic Development in 1999. Since relocating to Toronto with his family in 1997, he has continued an active practice encompassing photography, publishing, and artist-run initiatives. His work is held in the collections of M+, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and Hong Kong Heritage Museum. The Lee Ka-sing & Holly Lee Archive, documenting more than five decades of creative activity, is organized by Asia Art Archive.

 

 (Front and back covers of each volume )