CURATORIAL NOTE
Macao is a city on the south coast of China that is exceptional. It is known to the outside world as the “Las Vegas of the East,” but for its residents it is an old, sixteenth-century trading port. Fortunately, the old city has been almost completely preserved. What is often overlooked by tourists, and other visitors from China and around the world, is that this seemingly small city also has a huge new “twin.”
After Macao’s return to China in 1999, it underwent a round of leapfrogging development. It can be said that because of its special history and location, Macao is not only an East Asian tourist hotspot, a node for cultural exchanges between the East and the West and a platform for cross-cultural cooperation in the region but, beyond all this, it is facing confusion and encountering challenges. In the face of successive huge waves of globalization and the evolution of digitalization and intelligence, is it still possible for Macao to maintain its own cultural characteristics? How can globalized development and digital intelligence solve its various social contradictions and problems? Besides being swept along by urban development, is there any room for creative development in Macao?
In our opinion, the most confusing and interesting thing about Macao is that this not-so-big city seems to be composed of several cities side by side. These multiple cities are so different in character that they seem to have nothing to do with each other; nonetheless – and incredibly – they coexist peacefully. A visitor who had been here before Macao’s return to China in 1999, who had frequented the old Casino Lisboa, would surely be shocked by the huge contrast between the new tower of the Grand Lisboa and the old city of Macao. And a visitor who was familiar with the history of Macao would also be shocked by the scale and size of the new city on the island of Hengqin, because it seems to come from some completely different world in parallel time and space.
If we call the old city of Macao, this area where time seems to flow slowly, “World 1: Old Town” (it can, in fact, almost be called a kind of “nature”), then the series of newly built, huge casino buildings represented by MGM and the Grand Lisboa tower, a kind of “collective” of a backdrop-style city representing the powerful forces of capital, can be called “World 2: Casino City.” The new city represents the whole world’s obsession with and overconfidence in “modern” cities and buildings since the turn of the twentieth century – and it displays a super-cultural, super-human construction model, scale and lifestyle. This we can call “World 3: New City,” but what is easily overlooked is that the digital operation in the new city is invisible: like all cities in China, Macao is also a cashless city – and we can call this invisible city “World 4: Digital City.”
This coexistence of four worlds is what makes Macao so extraordinary. It could be argued that across Asia, reality is often more shocking than fiction. Macao’s cultural influence is immense; it can be said that not only is it named the “Las Vegas of the East” but also that hundreds of cities throughout China and Southeast Asia are the result (to co-opt Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s famous phrase) of “learning from Las Vegas.” The harmonious coexistence of several completely different cities serves as the secret code to the region’s history and culture, while the uncertain collision between parallel worlds implied by these cities may stimulate all kinds of creative forces.
Wang Shu & Lu Wenyu