A house is like a mirror of the person who’s living there. To Ka-sing the photographer, the portrait of a house is also a portrait of the house owner in a lightly subdued way. Swan House has been the home for Toronto artist, educator and art critic Gary Michael Dault and his wife Malgorzata for nearly ten years. It is situated in the town of Napanee, Eastern Ontario, about two and a half hours drive from Toronto. Gary calls his home Swan House, for the gorgeous Victorian detached house was built in 1860, and elegantly bedecked with stained-glass swans. In the winter of 2019, Lee Ka-sing and Holly Lee visited Swan House for two days.

The photographs from Swan House were originally released in the e-zine DOUBLE DOUBLE. It is now published as a book, with a compilation of 166 photographs.

For two days, from morning to night, Ka-sing had been exploring Swan House, moving from the sun-filled library (where a grand piano was situated) to the dining room; from the kitchen to the cinema room; the poetry room to the French literature room, quietly studied every delicate detail of the house. In discreet and subtle ways, Lee harvested a significant body of pictures at a leisurely pace. His repeated gaze, gentle observation, and atmospheric rendering of Swan House readily discharged some remarkable quality; the idly flow of images, softly subdued and dreamlike. A deeply meditative and tender book; a slow soul trip to beauty, mystery and tranquility.

In the correspondence Gary wrote to Ka-sing and Holly after seeing the book, he said, “The photographs, soft as cat fur or the pearly backs of the rock-doves in the garden, generate an endless mystery: they seem to live both in the documentary present and equally (more so, actually) in the soft archival past… as well as a glorious nonstop beauty!”