What is Macau after all? To whom does this place belong? These big questions always pop up in my mind whenever I’m flying. Seeing strangers talking and laughing in the front seats and turning to look at the tiny specks of land from the aircraft windows, I do not have a certain answer in my head.
Macau has always been an existence of heterogeneity. With some extraordinary stories to tell, it has always been the various imaginations for many. After some four hundred years of Portuguese colonization, change of regimes came to Macau fifteen years ago, soon followed by the liberalisation of the gaming industry and the Mainland China’s facilitated individual travel scheme (FIT). The postcolonial Macau had no time to adapt its new identity before plunging into the torrent of capital. From quietness, haven, danger, Mafias in the past to today’s prosperity, entertainment, crowdedness, or the nouveaux riches sitting at the front, these imageries evoked by Macau in different eras are constantly evolving. To borrow a concept from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Macau is a giant ‘heterotopia’ – it is not a paradise in fiction but an actual hetereogenous realm, a space for compensation and imagination that serves as an exile for various desires. Macau has been so since it was a colony in the past, and is still the same today being a Special Administrative Region.
Looking back thirty years ago, a number of local and emigrant artists such as Mio Pang Fei, Carlos Marreiros, Guo Huan and Dr. Ung Vai Meng strived to express this hybrid identity of Chinese and Western cultures and experience the freedom of modern art. Today thirty years later, however, eight local-bred contemporary artists cannot dodge from the impacts of this chaotic epoch, constantly negotiating with how to survive in this ‘desirable’ heterotopias, and because of that, their creative gestures are increasingly intense.
In this exhibition, Paradise done by Eric Fok depicts the concrete jungle of the modern city in the approach of ancient map. Being the paradise of empires where time and space are differently shaped, colony is the most typical heterotopia Foucault accounts. Ironically, the endless ambition of ancient empires for colonial expansion in the Age of Discovery found fertile ground now and spreads towards the sky and sea with high-rises and land reclamation; colonization still persists but in another form. Also, referring to the amusing Because of Camera, I Met the Various Flavors of Life by Lio Hak Man, the scenes of tourists remind us of the crowdedness of the city. The cameras and smiley faces somehow reveals the nature of tourism. Speaking of consumption, one cannot leave La Collection by Hong Wai behind. The female symbols and sleeping baby isolated in the round Xuan paper simply calls for voyeuristic gaze from the spectators.
If the contemporary Macau is considered as ‘heterotopia’, the heterogenous part undoubtedly lies in the ambiguity and marginalization of its political status. Wong Ka Long’s Protruding Heads with its sarcastic political message captures that Buddhist philosophy ceaselessly wrestles with the authoritarian governance and they are seemingly irreconcilable. For Alice Kok’s manifesto-like artworks, Renminbi banknotes are burnt violently down into ashes while illusion of money existence are created again; she destroy the sanctity of capitalism and exposes the growing ethnical conflicts. Indeed, there are still many ‘lines of flight’ in heterotopia. As the medium of communication between life and death in Cantonese folk culture, the paper sculpture O created by Ann Hoi investigates liminality between the real and the virtual via rituals; the eerie reality is in fact not that far from the otherworldly realm. Tong Chong’s Performance nostalgically adopts the ancient painting techniques to relive the old good times, while Sylvyie Lei seeks light in the claustrophobic darkness.
Looking at the passengers in the aircraft who are either flying away or flying back to their realities, I realize that the significance of heterotopia is it urges you to re-examine the surroundings and experience the current time and space in a different perspective. Furthermore, it forces you to confront with your desires and longings, and to look at where your happiness truly lies. As the familiar landscape outside the window becomes larger, reality seems to have been reshaped once again. With the flight lands and people come and go, how will Macau look like this time?
Pang Kam Tou
