Guest Author of January 2010

After a short winter break, we return with our Monthly Guest Author column. For January, we would like to present an essay by David Clarke, Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Hong Kong. David Clarke has published extensively on the topics of both modern & contemporary art, and the cultural and political transformations within the urban sphere – especially regarding Hong Kong. Being a photographer as well a scholar, his scientific approach towards the visual representations of identity, ideology and their possible subversion is informed by his own practice and the experience of the artist’s gaze.

In his essay, he analyzes the changes that have taken place in the former Portuguese colony of Macau since its return to Chinese sovereignty, and how they influenced the city’s appearance – appearance meaning both the façades constructed for the commercial “identity” of Macau as a new Las Vegas mainly for tourists, and the appearance as perceived by the current inhabitants, for whom the – faux or authentic – “historical” colonial aesthetic of the streets and buildings might bear no relevance regarding their personal histories and identity. While the artificial Vegas design meets its counterpart in ‘old’ Macau, the latter might still be perceived in a similar, non-critical way as being simply nostalgic. For contemporary artists, both variants of a Macau “façade” are constructions that have to be subverted in order to ensure relevant artistic – and social – practice.

Illuminating Façades: Looking at Post-Colonial Macau

First settled by the Portuguese in 1557, Macau’s position at the mouth of China’s Pearl River Delta enabled it to play a significant role in the early development of trading and other links between East Asia and Europe. However, its pivotal role was already threatened by the 18th century following the Japanese prohibition on foreign trade, and after the establishment of the British colony of Hong Kong in the mid-19th century it was to become of even less significance in global terms. This ‘backwater’ status of Macau as a small, isolated, culturally distinct European settlement on Chinese soil was to largely persist until its eventual return to Chinese sovereignty in December 1999, as a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. Such a ‘return’ is hardly a post-colonial moment in the usual sense (there being no independent statehood on offer), but the handover of Macau from Portugal to China does represent the ending of an era, and has occasioned a major and very visible remaking of the territory. This process of transformation will be the focus of attention of both this text and its accompanying photo essay, and particular consideration will be given to the visual implications or dimensions of this process, and to the possible interrogative role of images¹.

While thinking of Macau as undergoing a transition between ‘old’ and ‘new’ that can be temporally mapped onto the 1999 handover moment, it is also important to consider the matter in spatial terms, and note that in a certain sense the ‘old’ Macau is still present alongside the ‘new’ Macau, albeit that the two exist in largely separate locations. Many pre-existing vernacular structures (and thus the forms of life that they enable) may be disappearing as the city is remade, but churches and other older buildings of ‘conservation status’, particularly those with European associations, have been preserved and renovated, and the streets around them laid with a kind of mosaic pavement designed to create an old-world Portuguese feel. The older part of the city is still saturated with such historical relics, but they are less and less a part of any real lived experience and instead are actually the necessary counterpart of its newer side, a ‘new old’ which functions as the binary other of the (perhaps not so new) new. Instead of being primarily functional structures, they are now (particularly since the city’s historical centre was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2005), first and foremost, structures to be looked at (a fact underlined by their nocturnal illumination, for example by the spotlights before the ruined façade of St. Paul’s, a building one can only gaze at since it no longer has any interior to enter).

The façade of St Paul’s, 26 October 1997.

Furthermore, the ‘history’ of which they are the visual reminders is one that the majority of the enclave’s residents have no particular personal sense of belonging to. It is not a history strongly entwined with memory and identity and thus one capable of being mobilized as a potentially subversive force with respect to the present, but a carefully sanitized or embalmed history which addresses, across the heads of the local populace, the reifying tourist gaze.

The place of the ‘new’ Macau, in contrast to that of its counterpart, is across sites that literally have no history to them, in that they are on newly reclaimed land (space here being a commodity that can be manufactured like any other). Such reclamation and subsequent construction took place during the 1990s along the edge of the Macau peninsula facing the island of Taipa, between the Hong Kong–Macau Ferry Terminal and the farther ends of the Praia Grande, the city’s historic waterfront which now only fronts onto a man-made lake. A further phase of reclamation in this area is underway at the time of writing.

Land reclamation in progress, 16 March 1995.

Whereas Macau had for a long time been defined by its separateness, the intention of much of the new construction is to create connectedness: the new Macau is on the one hand to be revitalized by reinsertion within the global networks of capital (in large part through tourism, and especially through an expansion of its well-known gambling industry), and at the same time to be reintegrated within the national fabric of the nominally communist People’s Republic. Such emphasis on a new connectedness can be found even at the level of physical infrastructure. Since 1995, Macau has had its own international airport, and although since 1974 the city has been connected by a mile-long bridge to Taipa (the nearest of the two islands which together with the peninsula make up the small territory of Macau), it now has three such structures. The islands of Taipa and Coloane, in fact, are no longer even separate from each other. Over the last few years they have been joined into one by further reclamation (creating a new zone that has been named Cotai), and a second link to mainland China called the Lotus Bridge has been opened from Cotai to supplement the pre-existing Barrier Gate to the city’s north. In addition to these already existing links, a further massive bridge project is planned, which will link Macau directly to Hong Kong (its sister Special Administrative Region which returned to Chinese sovereignty a little over two years earlier). This bridge, which could halve travel time between the two cities, is also intended to further Macau’s integration with the Pearl River Delta, that massive workshop of the world to which most of its own industrial production has now migrated.

As well as these physical links, and in part dependent on them, are the flows of people that have equally served to erode Macau’s ‘backwater’ or ‘marooned’ status. These include the large flows of new immigrants from mainland China (one part of a truly massive process of internal migration taking place within China as a whole) and the increasing number of tourists who are visiting the territory (or who are projected to do so). More than eight million visited in 1996, for instance (more than 16 times the city’s total population at the time), and by 2005 the figure had risen even higher, with 21.9 million visitors arriving (including 11.9 million from mainland China), see Fox and Eng (2007: A1). Even within the enclave itself, a greater circulation of people seems a characteristic of the new Macau, as if a new addiction to physical speed might help to throw off the city’s former perceived inertia and stasis, or at least provide a contrast to the pace of the walkable spaces in its older urban centre². The newly reclaimed areas are traversed by high-speed roads, and even distant Coloane seems much nearer nowadays. It retains some of its previous ‘sleepy’ character, but only because it is being self-consciously preserved as a tourist destination, a supposed ‘backwater within a backwater’ that is in actuality accessibly placed on a regular tourist trail. For a real backwater, one would need to travel to Macau’s northern district, home to many of the more recent arrivals from China and a place where the traces of poverty are easy to discover. Much nearer than Coloane to the city’s centre, it yet remains inaccessible to the tourist gaze because it lies off the patterns of approved circulation.

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Although, owing to its newness, the reclaimed land prevents any intrusion of the traces of actual history, on one particular part of it, just down the road from the Hong Kong–Macau Ferry Terminal, a wholly fake, borrowed spectacle of history has been given a place. This is the ‘Macau Fisherman’s Wharf’, where shops and restaurants built behind façades resembling those of various scenic locations in the rest of the world offer an array of consumption possibilities. Both time and space are collapsed here, with the same sign-post pointing to, say, a ‘Tang Dynasty Department Store’ and a ‘Roman Amphitheatre’, or ‘Aladdin’s Fort’ and ‘Da Gama Water World’. Here, Macau doesn’t want to be Macau at all, but some other place (or time) – or in an anxiety concerning identity, ‘new’ Macau perhaps wants to be many other places or times, or find for itself new pasts other than the colonial one it has stored away safely in the tourist sites of the old parts of the city. Even in the newly minted parts of Macau, the question of history cannot be completely exorcised, it seems, and although the ‘new’ Macau is structured in visible contrast to the old one, it needs models from elsewhere to follow: newness or contemporaneousness does not mean a pure autonomy but must be thought of in terms of borrowed templates.

In fact, the primary template for the new Macau is not hard to discover: it is Las Vegas. Macau has long depended on its gambling industry for a significant portion of its GDP, employment and government revenue, and with the decline of manufacturing in the face of mainland China’s economic boom, this primary pillar of its tourist trade is seen as the enclave’s saviour. Gambling had been a feature of Macau for some time, but it was following the establishment of a gambling monopoly in 1962 that the industry really began to develop in scale. The holder of the monopoly, Stanley Ho’s STDM, opened a casino in its Lisboa Hotel (itself built on land taken from the harbour during an earlier phase of reclamation), and has played a major role in the city’s development – for example, by establishing a high-speed jetfoil service linking Macau and Hong Kong. In 2001, however, the monopoly came to an end and the gambling industry has now entered a new phase with a diversification of players on the scene, including several who were already associated with the Las Vegas industry, including Steve Wynn and the Las Vegas Sands Corporation (with casinos already opened by both operators). Macau had already on occasion been referred to as the ‘Las Vegas of the East’ but now the connections between the two cities have become more actual. Furthermore, the visual appearance of Macau has in this new phase of the gambling industry begun to be significantly influenced by that of its Nevada counterpart.

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The new casinos being opened or scheduled for construction share with those of Las Vegas a concern for their external appearance and an obsession with the use of illuminated signage. Even the Lisboa has undergone a facelift to compete in this new game, and indeed Stanley Ho has been building a new hotel and casino complex called the Grand Lisboa adjacent to the existing one. The casino opened in February 2007, although the hotel tower which rises above it remains under construction at the time of writing. Over a base that resembles – apparently deliberately – a massive Fabergé egg, stands a flamboyant form more than 200 metres high. Anxious dependency on the model of Las Vegas is not hard to uncover here: this form is deliberately modelled on the feathered headdresses of Vegas showgirls that the architect Dennis Lau Hung-sun had seen on his study visit to the Nevada city, although the original design idea was later altered somewhat to allow a resemblance to the lotus, Macau’s official flower and thus a safely localized reference³.

While the Sands Macau sits on reclaimed land near the Hong Kong–Macau Ferry Terminal and the Macau Fisherman’s Wharf, several new casinos are scheduled for completion over the next few years on Cotai, the strip of reclaimed land connecting the islands of Taipa and Coloane. Amongst these is ‘The Venetian Macau’, a further project of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, whose fake history Venice theme reprises that of its prototype, the Las Vegas Venetian. Like the Macau Fisherman’s Wharf, this mirage of history involves a spatial collapsing, even if it only has one city as its referent (or two if we take this as a reference to Venice made via a reference to Las Vegas): the Rialto Bridge is placed right next to the Campanile di San Marco. Hoardings surrounding the construction site proclaim that this is ‘Asia’s Las Vegas’, lest we should take the European reference too seriously. The image of the good life these casinos offer seems largely aristocratic in its symbolism, and perhaps Venice with its Grand Tour associations fits in with this. An even more blatant expression of such aristocratic conceit can be found in the case of the Grand Emperor Hotel and casino, which has enormous illuminated displays with changing patterns of coloured light on more than one façade, featuring a version of the British royal crest. The pretence is carried further by the placement of a pair of imitation state carriages outside its main entrance, together with a couple of guardsmen standing to attention in full uniform, complete with bearskin hats.

As well as the casinos and their associated hotels, and the Macau Fisherman’s Wharf, the city’s new reclaimed land is also the site of the Macau Cultural Centre, one of the few places in the new Macau where Chinese national meanings are in any sense being given a locus of their own in a city now incorporated within the People’s Republic. This occurs, for instance, through the way in which the Macau Museum of Art hosts shows of Chinese art from prominent mainland museums, which serve to promote a sense of cultural belonging amongst local people (high cultural events in the past often being expressions of the Portuguese community). This process of ideological interpellation is not particularly heavy-handed, however, and the Museum does also present shows of local or international art in which different and perhaps even conflicting agendas are at play.

Interval during the performance of an opera, Macau Music Festival, 20 October 1996.

The most significant national event of the new Macau – the handover ceremony itself which took place over the midnight between 19 and 20 December 1999 – was also held in the vicinity of the Cultural Centre. It took place in a temporary structure specially designed for the purpose by Macau-based architect Vincente Bravo, featuring a translucent ceiling and walls which when illuminated took on the appearance of a giant Chinese lantern. This use of newly reclaimed land for a ceremony in which significant national meanings were at stake had already been seen in the case of Hong Kong’s handover ceremony, which was held in the newly constructed Extension of the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wanchai⁴. In both cases, reclaimed land enabled all historical associations to the colonial era to be banished from an auspicious forward-looking event for which the real audience was the Chinese populace as a whole, who were able to view the event on their TV screens. Like their mainland counterparts, the residents of Macau (with the exception of those few actually present at the ceremony itself) were to consume this post-colonial moment as an image, for example on the large screen erected in Senado Square, to which live coverage was fed. By its very nature, a resumption of the exercise of national sovereignty (like any post-colonial moment) is something very abstract, a mere matter of visual symbols such as flags moving up and down poles (even if many real-world consequences follow from this), and thus the visual parameters and connotations of such an event need to be as carefully controlled as possible to maximize their ideological effectiveness⁵.

Crowds in the Senado Square, shortly before the handover of sovereignty, 19 December 1999.

Although this (visual) production of a sense of national unity achieved through the Macau handover was very serviceable to the ideological aims of the Beijing government (given that not many people in China actually believe in communism any more, nationalist ideology is now the primary social binding force), in actual fact there was little problem locally in gaining acceptance of Chinese communist rule. In this sense, Macau differed significantly from the case of Hong Kong where, even now, approximately a decade past its return to China, strong voices critical of the one-party state and its anti-democratic agendas for the city can be heard. The actual moment of the handover appeared lacking in trauma for most Macau residents, and in analysing the reasons for this, the counter-case of Hong Kong is a useful reference to employ since the two cities shared the unusual post-colonial fate of absorption into a larger state entity rather than independence.

What Macau seems to lack, but which Hong Kong possesses, is a significant sense of local cultural identity, and thus a sense of owning a separate history⁶. The handover, therefore, was not it seems taken by Macau people as an event that was happening to them – it was not an event in their own felt history in the same way that the old buildings in the city centre were not felt to be relics of a history that belonged to them. One factor in this is of course the scale of immigration that Macau has faced, one aspect of its increased connectedness noted earlier. Residents of the city born in mainland China are now a significant percentage of its total population (which immigration has recently brought above a half million), and a sense of relatedness to the city’s past is hardly something one should expect amongst these newer arrivals⁷. The low figure of Macau’s total population (no matter where its inhabitants were born) when compared to that of Hong Kong is also a factor to be considered. The city perhaps lacks the critical mass of population necessary to sustain many of the institutions of civil society which would enable a strong sense of separate cultural identity to emerge in a place which has no real ethnic markers of difference from its hinterland, on which more essentialist understandings of selfhood could arise. Crucial amongst such institutions (all of which Hong Kong does possess) are a vibrant newspaper press, a university sector large enough to support a local intelligentsia, and an active movie industry of its own. Macau does have something of its own artistic scene but this again is relatively small and lacking in infrastructural support when compared to that of Hong Kong, and thus less able to play a role in development of the kind of self-representations which are crucial for a reflexive sense of separate cultural identity to be fashioned.

Many of the artistic representations of Macau, by both locals and outsiders, focus on what I am terming here the ‘old’ city. There is of course much of value in the attempt to photographically document old forms of life being erased through ‘development’ (as Macau’s Frank Lei and visiting New Zealander Laurence Aberhart have done), to preserve them at least as memories in visual form in order that a residue of overlooked history might remain as a potential irritant in the amnesiac present⁸. At the same time, however, as I am arguing here, ‘old’ Macau has already been largely refashioned as an innocuous counterpart of ‘new’ Macau, and thus an engagement with historical relics is not per se of critical value. The many images of peeling walls and shabby decay, which photographers in particular have produced of Macau, can easily serve an apolitical nostalgia, offering a modern-day variant on the picturesque mode which fails to critically address the actual changes currently occurring in the city. Simply to lament what has gone is not quite an adequate response to what is appearing.

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Amongst more critical responses to Macau’s post-colonial landscape are those of Macau’s main alternative artist-run space, the Old Ladies House Art Space. Originally sited in an older building of some character (from which it took its name), it was eventually forced to move out, and is now based in a less favoured location in the city’s northern district, the Ox Warehouse. It has responded proactively to the new situation it finds itself in, however, by initiating community art projects with the residents of this poorer, new immigrant area, and even with artists living across the internal border in the neighbouring city of Zhuhai. Recent exhibitions at the Ox Warehouse venue have made Macau’s urban development the subject of critical attention: Capture Memories of Ilha Verde (29 April–17 June 2007) engaged with a distinctive Northern District settlement now facing clearance, while Suspended City Vision (14 April–26 May 2007) looked at threats to the city’s fabric from new development, taking as its focus the Guia Lighthouse, the oldest on the China coast (see Lei, 2007: 99–101).

I am aware that the view of Macau available from the vantage point of its neighbouring city, Hong Kong, is as liable to be infected by the nostalgic tourist gaze as any other. At the same time, however, there are perhaps specific possibilities available in this uniquely situated viewpoint. After all, Hong Kong also has a colonial past, having already gone through its handover to Chinese rule a little earlier than Macau, and has itself experienced phases of accelerated ‘development’ (with associated waterfront land reclamation and bridge building). A felt closeness and even identification led several Hong Kong artists to spend time in Macau around the period of its handover: Yank Wong gave informal art classes at the former venue of the Old Ladies House Art Space, for instance, and political cartoonist Zunzi was amongst a group of Hong Kong and Macau street theatre activists arrested briefly on the night of the Macau handover while attempting to perform in the Senado Square. As both a resident of Hong Kong myself, and a photographer, I have sought here, and in the photo essay that follows, to engage the critical potential of such a perspective, by making a visual as well as textual intervention. The photo-essay that accompanies this piece is a necessary counterpart to my critical exploration of Macau’s urban fabric, attempting to approach rather than retreat from the field of the visual, and the progressively spectacularized regime addressed first and foremost to the tourist or consumer’s gaze⁹.

Acknowledgements

The research on which this article is based was supported by the Hsu Long Sing Research Fund, administered by the Faculty of Arts of the University of Hong Kong. I gratefully acknowledge this crucial help. Thanks also to susan pui san lok and Colin Day for helpful feedback on an earlier draft.

Notes

¹ Up-to-date synoptic studies of Macau from a cultural perspective are hard to find. On Macau’s history, see Guillen-Nuñez (1984) and Pons (2002). For a social scientist’s perspective on the city around the moment of its handover, see Berlie (2000). For a cultural study made at the same moment, see Cheng (1999).

² For a long time Macau has been host to a Formula Three Grand Prix, but this temporary annual celebration of speed seemed only to emphasize the usual sleepiness of Macau. In the same way, one noticed a change of pace on arrival in Macau after travelling there from Hong Kong on the high-speed jetfoil service.

³ On the Grand Lisboa, see Gough (2007: 3).

⁴ I discuss the venue of the Hong Kong handover ceremony in Clarke (2001: 138–49).

⁵ For an analysis of the Hong Kong handover ceremony as an event in visual culture, see Clarke (2001: 199–202). The visual choreography of the Macau handover was in most respects modelled on the earlier Hong Kong event.

⁶ Such a sense of belonging to Macau does exist for the long-established Macanese (Portuguese/Chinese Eurasian) community, whose sense of cultural distinctness is expressed, for instance, in their cuisine. The Macanese constitute only a small percentage of Macau’s total population, however. On cultural identity in Hong Kong and its artistic expression, see Clarke (2001).

⁷ The substantial flow of labour into Macau to meet the needs of the casino boom has not been entirely friction-free. Feelings of resentment from those left at the bottom of the labour market (together with concerns about government corruption following a scandal involving the former transport and public works secretary Ao Man-long) have led recently to local calls for political reform and governmental transparency. These concerns, raised against the post-handover Macau administration headed by Chief Executive Edmund Ho Hau-wah (and not against the central government in Beijing), came to a climax in a rally of around 6000 people held on Labour Day (1 May) 2007. Much smaller in scale than the rallies held in Hong Kong, even allowing for the differences in population size, this was nevertheless something of a watershed for post-handover Macau. The rally garnered widespread press coverage, attracted by a police officer firing five warning shots into the air and a passing motorcyclist being injured by a bullet. Several demonstrators and police officers were also injured during the protest. See Fox (2007: 11).

⁸ Recent photos of Macau by Frank Lei are featured in Kim and Lei (2006). Laurence Aberhart’s photos of the city are collected in Aberhart (2001). Both books were published to accompany exhibitions held at the Macau Museum of Art.

⁹ Amongst aspects of the increasing spectacularization of the Macau cityscape not discussed in the text is the recent proliferation of large-scale digital display screens on building façades, and the construction of the Macau Tower, which opened in 2001. The primary function of this structure, which was built on reclaimed land, is to offer from its observation deck a spectacularizing viewpoint on Macau, and in particular its newer aspects.

References

Aberhart, L. (2001) Ghostwriting: Photographs of Macao by Laurence Aberhart. Macau: Macau Museum of Art.

Berlie, J.A. (2000) ‘Macau’s Overview at the Turn of the Century’, American Asian Review XVIII (4), Winter: 25–68. 404 journal of visual culture 6(3)

Cheng, C.M.B. (1999) Macau: A Cultural Janus. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Clarke, D. (2001) Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization. London: Reaktion Books.

Fox, Y.H. (2007) ‘D-Day for Democracy’, Sunday Morning Post (Hong Kong), 6 May.

Fox, Y.H. and Eng, D. (2007) ‘Booming Casinos Help Macau Narrow Visitors Gap with HK’, South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 18 January.

Gough, N. (2007) ‘Stanley Ho’s Feather Aims to Tickle Punters’ Fancy’, Sunday Morning Post (Hong Kong), 11 February.

Guillen-Nuñez, C. (1984) Macau. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kim, O. and Lei, F. (2006) City Sights: Photographs by Oan Kim and Frank Lei. Macau: Macau Museum of Art.

Lei, F. (2007) ‘In Search of a Direction in Transition – from the Old Ladies House Art Space to Ox Warehouse’, in M. Turner and B. Pang (eds) Trading Places: Contemporary Art and Cultural Imaginaries of the Pearl River Delta, pp. 99–101. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Art School and Hong Kong Arts Centre.

Pons, P. (2002) Macao. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.