Macau Art For All Society (AFA) has celebrated its 10th anniversary last year. This year we have reached the 11th year. It is the beginning of a new decade as if in the season of spring where the nature begins to grow again. As an artists association, the AFA was established to promote artistic creation in Macau by providing artists opportunities and platform to showcase their works. In the course of the past eleven years, we have seen that local artists are becoming younger and younger. Their works excel the previous generations in many ways. In an effort to reveal the new forces in the art scene of Macau, for its 11th anniversary exhibition, AFA has invited six artists who are among the youngest in the association and they were all born during the 1990’s.
These six artists are between the ages of 24 to 27, reaching toward the milestone age of 30 that Confucius considered as the “Age of Independence”. The artistic process during this phase is crucial. Under the effort of experiment and practice, young artists are laying a far-reaching foundation for their creative direction and artistic path.
The participating artists include Lei Chek On, Chan On Kei, Leong Chon, Leong Chi Mou, Zhang Ke and Sou Chon Kit. Their backgrounds are different and were not necessarily born in Macau. But they all based their works in this city where they call home now.
The youngest among them is Lei Chek On who is from Guangdong. He moved to Macau in 2013 and graduated from the Visual Art School of Macau Polytechnic Institute in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in art, majoring in sculpture. The language of visual art that Lei Chek On has been developing is based on the "world" he sees. A world that is withering and illusory. He wants to hold on to something, but is cautious of obsessive grasping. Therefore he purifies the image he sees through abstract brushstrokes, creating the "Condensation Series" made during his studies. The simplicity in his abstract paintings is powerful and impressive. But his purpose is not merely to "simplify" but to filter into new shapes and spaces. This exhibition shows the sculptures he made when he graduated. These strange objects are the artistic expressions he extracts from the traditional symbolic forms created in historical China. Together with his two latest paintings “Shenlu” and “Sertar”, we see that after the training of abstract painting techniques, Lei Chek On begins to formally create his beloved world of myth. The painting "Shenlu" depicts the "Ming Dynasty Tombs" in Beijing. This road leading to the spiritual world of the Ming Emperors is also the path to the spiritual pursuit of Lei Chek On. During the making of this painting, he painted another more abstract painting: “Sertar”. Lei Chek On says that although he has been to Tibet, he has never been to the famous Sertar Larung Gar Buddhist Academy in Garze, Sichuan. When he was painting “Sertar”, he simply wanted to express his inner emotions. When it was finished, he realized that the painting was actually this famous monastery. “Sertar” is in fact the artist's hidden suggestion to himself. He is not willing to be bound by the geographical site of the Ming Tombs, nor is he willing to merely vent his emotions through the process of painting. He is restless moving between the figurative and the abstract. And it is a spiritual calling, with which he finally embarks on his own path.
Born in Hong Kong, Chan On Kei graduated from the Macau Polytechnic Institute in 2015 with a bachelor's degree in art and is studying at the National Taipei University of Education in a master's degree of art and design. Chan On Kei presents three pieces of ceramic works in the current exhibition, with the theme of high heels. Chan On Kei has a special liking for high-heeled shoes since the early days of her artistic creation. Before that, she created a series of hand-kneaded high-heeled ceramic works in Macau. At this stage, she abandons the existing appearance of high-heeled shoes, transforms it into a symbol, using plaster mold to cast high-heeled shoes forms. The shape is then re-synthesized into various shapes, including the jawbone-shaped animal trap, or different parts of the body, including the disc bone and the spine. This process reveals the transformation of Chan On Kei on her personal artistic path. As a woman, she would like to ask, is high heels a beautifying tool or is it a curse? After all, its beauty is based on the pain it brings. This contradiction raises questions at the beginning of her artistic quest. Then she transforms the entity that creates contradiction into a part of artistic creation through the study of art and modeling. It is also part of herself. Her animal catcher, disc bone and spine of high-heeled shoes are made with such meticulous care and flawless artistry. The objects that are taken for granted in our popular culture are released from the pain by the withdrawal into symbols. But she captures the core of its distortion and transforms it into a commensurate piece of art.
Born in Macau, Leong Chon graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 2016 with a Bachelor of Arts in Sculpture and graduated from the University for the Creative Arts in the United Kingdom in 2017. Leong Chon's artistic exploration is carried out through sculpture, painting, installation and performance art. During his studies at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, his works mainly revolved around the meaning and readability of sculpture. One of his works in this exhibition, “Destined Life" was made during his graduation. It depicts a pig's head and the internal organs of its brain were portrayed by the artists and shaped into an idol as if it were a religious golden statue. At that time, Leong Chin has begun to question and was trying to subvert the connotation of “meaning”. When he arrived in the UK, he tried more thoroughly to break away from any existing form, by breaking up materials (such as bricks) and reorganize them into different shapes. Today, he shows his latest two portraitures in painting. The painting method uses the principle of oil painting and oil absorption. From the gap between the reflection and the oil layer, one can barely recognize the contents of the paintings. This kind of experiment on the "visibility" of images is exactly the opposite of the current “Instant-culture” of image on social media. The subversive nature of a young artist can clearly be seen.
Leong Chi Mou moved to Macau from Guangdong in 2003. He has an innate talent for painting since childhood when he learned Chinese painting techniques from TV programs. After he moved to Macau, he was influenced by Western art. He used Chinese and Western painting elements of the Italian artist Giuseppe Castiglione and began the “Blue Gold series” in "The Heyday Series" during the graduation period at the Macau Polytechnic Department of Visual Arts, majoring in oil painting. Leong Chi Mou is deeply interested in the fusion of Chinese and Western art. His vision of art is not merely on the individual level, but is a reflection of his own situation projected onto the thinking of local culture and identity. The blue melancholy and the golden luxury of the “Blue Gold series” are inspired from his reflection on Macau. Giuseppe Castiglione's integration of Western aesthetics into Chinese traditional painting was used in the context of "fake Chinese painting" created by Leong Chi Mou. It is a form of hidden irony of the so-called "Chinese-Western fusion." After that, this kind of satire goes further on the basis of his technical maturity. The "Alchemist Project" displayed in the current exhibition points directly to the recent forecast of the International Monetary Fund Organization, referring in the year 2020, Macau's per capita GDP will be elevated to the highest position of the world. In response to this, Leong Chi Mou has produced a magnified coin and a black gold credit card with no market value. He uses the technique of repeating the popular culture in Pop Art to satirize the values of today's society. Just like his previous “Blue Gold series”, he questions, can the art of imitation, embezzlement and copying be able to stand the test of the so-called "market"? The exquisiteness of his works is so enticing, is it a deliberate act? Or is it a joke with black humor? One smiles knowingly.
Zhang Ke graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. She graduated from the Experimental Art School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2014, and studied under Mr. Xu Bing. In 2016, she held her first solo exhibition at the Macau Art For All Society. For the current exhibition she continues the style of the medieval hand-made book, and uses the gray painting method “Grisaille” to paint. In the past three years, she has been using erotic theme as her creative subject, mixing collage and painting/drawing techniques to create teasing images filled with pleasure. It is a kind of self-liberation and resistance of a young female artists in the patriarchal society. In the new works presented in the exhibition, she changes from her lively and teasing style by using the darker classical sketch Grisaille technique to describe two novels by the Nobel Prize writer Jose Saramago. The novel "Blindness" is about the darkness of human nature. Zhang Ke's work "Eyes as Metaphor" depicts the hideousness of human nature described in the novel. The fragments of the human body cover the main area and the border of the paintings. From the expansion of the frame and shape; the change of color and tone; to the deeper exploration and expression of the subject matter from human sexual desire to human ignorance, we see the distinct temperament and maturity of a female artist. The themes that Zhang Ke is willing to engage have never been easy topics. She wants to explore the bottom line of morality and humanity that image suggests. Her sensitivity to the world leads her intuitively to grasp the essence of the issue, and then she uses her favorite visual language to tell her version of the stories. Her work is the emotion she projected into, more and more exciting, delicate and far-reaching.
Born in Macau, Sou Chon Kit is different from the rest of the participating artists in that he has never studied in a formal art school. His life was full of twists and turns. Started to draw and paint since childhood, he encountered setbacks at a young age, and has even given up on himself. Then he happened to meet local art teachers Wong Ka Long and Cai Guojie, who introduced him back to art. Soon he took up the brush and painted again, and emerged himself completely into it. The process is a bit like that of Jackson Pollock, through the properties of the material, painting has become a vital exploration. Sou Chon Kit simply enjoys the process of solubility of pigment and water. At first, he let the material dominate, and then he adds the splash technique, and then he tries to control the shapes. His art does not suggest much symbolic meaning, nor does it require any theoretical explanation. There is only the pure union between the artist and the material. Art is the embodiment of life. Sou Chon Kit 's art experiment outside of the academics is sincere and courageous. He devotes himself into dancing with the paint and the surface of the canvas; the revealing mountains or rivers in his works are the very landscape of his heart and mind.
It is said that the post-90s generation will be a generation that vigorously promotes individuality. Looking at the works of these six young artists in the exhibition, I would say this is true. Through the plasticity of art, they experiment and create their own languages, and the results are rather impressive. As a curator, I feel that "plasticity" is not enough to describe their current state, but it is the manifestation of this forming energy. The magic of artistic creation is the release of ideas and emotions through the shaping of images and forms. This energy is like the wind that creates the waves. The surging waves of the Yangtze River are pushing forward, and we will wait and see in order to witness the official launch of a new generation of artistic sparks taking place in front of our eyes.
Alice Kok