Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World: Negotiating Alterity in Art and Its Historical Interpretation

Chapter 6: The haunted city: Hong Kong and its urban others in the postcolonial era

Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World 182 Amongst more active responses to Macau’s postcolonial 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 (see Figure 93) from which it took its name, it was eventually forced to move 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 mainland Chinese 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), for instance, engaged with a distinctive northern district settlement facing clearance. ‘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, views of which are in danger of being obscured by new highrise property developments.16 Figure 93 Courtyard of the Old Ladies House Art Space, Macau, with talk by Hong Kong choreographer Yuri Ng taking place, 27 April 2002. Photo by the author. Illuminating facades: Looking at postcolonial Macau 183 Finding a very different but equally productive strategy for responding to Macau’s present situation is the Russian-born artist Konstantin Bessmertny, who has been based in Macau since 1993. Unlike most other Macau artists he is willing to address the subject of gambling directly in his works, allowing card games or casino scenes to feature in some of his ambiguous, narratively-fragmented paintings (for example, Casino Narrative No. 1, 2007, oil on wood, see Figure 94), and even using gambling chips directly as an element in certain sculptural constructions. When Bessmertny was invited to represent Macau in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) it was also almost inevitable that he would take the construction of the casino and entertainment complex of the Venetian Macao as an opportunity to play with the connections between the city he was representing and the city in which his work was to be shown. Not denying Macau’s present, Bessmertny does also allude to its past, for example through the inclusion of Latin or Portuguese inscriptions in his works (which are also as likely to Figure 94 Konstantin Bessmertny, Casino Narrative No. 1, oil on wood, 2007. Photo courtesy the artist and Amelia Johnson Contemporary. Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World 184 include references to Chinese culture). Historical and cultural references are jumbled in this collage-like aesthetic, but unlike at Fisherman’s Wharf it here serves a demystifying role. The history of oil painting seems to haunt Bessmertny’s work — appropriately so given that Macau was formerly home to George Chinnery (1774–1852), and through his influence an important site for the dissemination of the medium on the south China coast. At times Bessmertny seems to be alluding to the idiom of Bruegel or of seventeenthcentury Dutch masters such as Steen in developing his oblique satirical take on contemporary Macau life. A deliberate naïvety of presentation is often adopted, such as might be found amongst practitioners of European idioms of painting in far-flung colonial locations, thus allowing an allusion to Macau’s ‘backwater’ status that might seem deliberately and humourously anachronistic in the present moment. Such a reference to early oil painting in Macau and the region seems quite explicitly to be made in certain of the paintings included in his exhibition ‘China Trade!’, held at Amelia Johnson Contemporary, Hong Kong (15 May–6 June 2009).17 Here the exhibition title refers to the notion of ‘China trade painting’, a term commonly used to describe the early images of the south China coast produced locally for Western buyers (while also of course alluding to the gold rush of the world’s traders and investors to China in our own time). One of the most ambitious paintings in this exhibition was China Trade: Vista da Praia Grande (oil on canvas, 2009, see Figure 95), which offers a view of Macau’s historic waterfront that deliberately echoes the Praia Grande’s representation in numerous China trade images of the...