"They reinvent memory, but at the same time, by recording it, they are preventing it from falling into oblivion.” This is the description given by the curator of the exhibition, João Miguel Barros, of the works being exhibited at the Berardo Museum in Lisbon, by Guilherme Ung Vai Meng and Chan Hin Io.
Both Ung Vai Meng, who normally uses drawing as an artistic expression, and photographer Chan Hin Io, wanted to record the transformations that Macau has undergone, by photographing places that are about to disappear before they be- come memories, explains the curator of the (De)Construction of Memory exhibition.
“They wanted to look at these changes in order to register them, so that they do not fall into oblivion,” says João Miguel Barros. “They have the ability to perceive this situation and are able to make an intervention, a performance, which then results in dozens of photographs as testimonies of what will cease to exist,” he adds. “They make an intervention in the present,knowing that the next day, probably this gift, besides being past, will become a memory that is no longer possible to go back and be visited.”
The exhibition, which opened at the Berardo Museum in November and will continue until February 9, has 40 chapters, divided into five parts: “Memory”, “Ritualism”, “Lightness”, “Ceremony” and “Paradise”. In the “Memory” room, there are images of Macau’s social reality and reconstructions of past events. In “Ritualism,” bamboo is highlighted.
“These are photographs where bamboo dominates, photographs of places that had bamboo around them and where the artists took the opportunity to make their interventions,” notes João Miguel Barros, adding that two masters of bamboo went to Lisbon to build an 11-metre high structure designed by Ung Vai Meng.
The video component appears in the “Lightness” room, where a film made in Macau is presented, which is intended to symbolize the “diffuse relationship between people, time and space”, as described in the exhibition catalog.
In the fourth room, “Ceremony”, there are images recorded in spaces previously used by industry and maritime commerce. Finally, in “Paradise”, large, round images of places that no longer exist are shown.
“These records are not merely anthropological studies or documentary photography, they are an artistic intervention,” says the curator.
According to Barros, Ung Vai Meng, the former president of the Cultural Affairs Bureau, and Chan Hin Io “are two Macau artists with very different personalities and artistic practices.” The connection became formal through the collective YiiMa, “which offers a sense of twin brothers, sharing the way they view art and their responsibility as artists towards society.”
(De) Construction of Memory is a project “completely unheard of,” with “works that they have only previously shown to a very narrow circle”. The exhibition took two years to prepare and will hopefully be brought to Macau later this year.
