Preface
As a dynamic and versatile genre, created of many layers, and requiring only simple tools, watercolour has long been favoured as a convenient, adaptable and impressive medium for sketching on location, en plein air. In early works, watercolours made in Macao were mostly topographical paintings, but later captured an array of local scenery and customs. Watercolours have played an important role in the city’s own art history and cultural exchanges between the East and the West.
Macao’s status – as a trading port between the East and the West, a base for religious dissemination and a cultural exchange platform – has enhanced since the mid-16th century. Thus, the city attracted many Western painters. Visiting artists such as George Chinnery and Auguste Borget depicted the city’s character in watercolour. Beautiful impressions of Macao in the past were often first seen by Western eyes in watercolour. While many may have regarded watercolour as a first step into the art world, by contrast, local painters from the last few generations often chose watercolour as their medium for the entirety of their careers. They strove to hone and perfect their skills and to pass them down to young aspiring artists. Today, watercolour painting is recognised as Macao’s most popular and active artistic medium.
Journeys of Light: Macao Landscape Watercolours from the Macao Museum of Art Collection has been jointly organised by Macao’s Cultural Affairs Bureau and Portugal’s Macau Scientific and Cultural Centre to promote and strengthen the cultural and artistic exchange between China and Portugal. The exhibition displays in Lisbon 50 Macao-themed artworks from the Macao Museum of Art collection by 17 Macao artists, presenting a diverse showcase of watercolour paintings created from the 1970s onwards. The exhibition title ‘Journeys of Light’ symbolises the journey of watercolour paintings – with colours, light and shadows as the major forms of expression – to Southern Europe, signifies that Macao’s distinctive cultural landscapes were primarily painted under the sun’s bright gaze, and also reiterates an ideal that artists young and old in Macao will continue to further the creation of art in the city.
This exhibition features many excellent works by veteran painters and emerging artists. Some continue techniques passed on by old masters, and some are cutting-edge trailblazers working in new and exciting ways, particularly in the way to depict light. Two such different approaches are apparent in the water scenes created by Kwok Se and Herculano Estorninho. The former’s ‘Sailing Home’ uses a subtle yet abstract approach to depict the setting sun’s afterglow in a hazy atmosphere, while the latter’s ‘Junk’ emphasises a ship’s shadows amid sparkling sea waves in lush and unrestrained brushstrokes. Young painter Lai Sio Kit’s new work ‘Secret Garden’ and veteran artist Tam Chi Sang’s pieces, ‘St. Francis Garden’ and ‘Lou Lim Ioc Garden’, each capture quiet moments with delightful contrasting techniques. The former is subtle and poetic, while the latter lays on a dense and spirited palette. Lio Man Cheong’s ‘St. Dominic’s Square’ and Lai Ieng’s ‘St. Dominic’s Square at Night’ illustrate the same location, one in the daytime and one at night, and both offer different perspectives, each fascinating in their own right. With a clear and bright palette, Lio Man Cheong takes on a delightfully delicate nature, while Lai leng applies rich, gorgeous colours and intense texture and melds the warm palette of many British watercolour paintings with imagery usually seen in Chinese ink art. Choi Su Weng’s ‘Regedor Street, Taipa’ is mysterious and cold while Poon Kam Ling’s ‘Coloane’ takes on a soft and detached quality. Yet both superb works deliver the charm, serenity and a sense of unworldliness of Macao’s islands. Ng Wai Kin’s ‘Pedro Nolasco da Silva Street’, which he created in 2022, echoes his teacher Kam Cheong Ling’s 1970 work ‘Macao Street Scene’ – both depict Macao’s dazzling streets in meticulous brushstrokes.
With gorgeously hazy and light freehand brushstrokes, watercolour is an ideal medium for capturing scenes harmoniously blending Southern Chinese vistas with Southern European landscape. Portuguese-style cobblestone pavements, slopes, narrow alleyways, shuttered windows, and hanging clothes between buildings are scenes often seen in both Lisbon and Macao. They will evoke the nostalgia of viewers from both locations. Images displayed in the exhibition feature signature locations, including beautiful churches, solemn temples, elegant Chinese gardens, majestic Western-style forts, ancient remains of the city’s defensive walls, and bustling street corners, declining barques and tricycles, alongside communities of fast-disappearing traditional wooden houses, much-loved snack bars, and anonymous old trees. These paintings capture a changing landscape where world heritage structures and ordinary life in Macao blend together, and they hold in time key moments of the city’s transformation from a historical port into an international city.
The remarkable local modern and contemporary watercolour collections that the Macao Museum of Art has selected highlight Macao’s distinctive, diverse beauty and bring a refreshed expression of the East to the West. Through the skilled artists’ hands, these paintings capture a pervading sense of humanity evident in our small city and retain its magnificent flowing light for eternity. As time marches forward, the scenery changes. Indeed, the only thing that can be relied on to stay the same is the freehand brushstrokes, which depict warm, cultivated moments shown in streaming sunshine and reflect the artists’ endless love of art and their hometown.
UN SIO SAN
Director of the Macao Museum of Art