In early September 1997, I met Frank Lei, who had returned to Macau from France for several years and was my photography teacher.
The summer of that year I remember, was not markedly hot. At the end of our teen years and the summer holidays, we became college students on the terrace of a building under the arrangement of fate. Everything in my memory is still so vivid. There were several new buildings on Paris Street in NAPE. In the middle of the building compound where the sun shone upon was the South Bank (Nam Ngon) Garden, with no flowers, no grass, only floor tiles. On the terrace space between the empty ground floor shops and the residential flats above was the Visual Arts School of the Macau Polytechnic Institute.
During class break times, students would gather outside the cafeteria of the terrace to eat spicy fish buns and drink milk tea while chatting. Everyone was excited and had endless lists of topics to talk about. In those days, there were only a few students studying art and design in Macau. Those who met on the terrace were like fellow travellers of the same path. A kind of tacit understanding was in the air, drawing us closer to one another. I remember how we were reluctant to finish the classes that year.
Photo by Chris Ho (何家永)
Frank Lei, who we called “Lei Sir” was particularly popular with the students. After class, we would always crowd around him and ask him all sorts of questions about our ideas. Although the students loved to talk to him, in our mind, he was not really an eloquent speaker. The tone of his speech was monotonous and slow, he did not like to preach and his long pauses in between phrases made us ponder. When he looked at our photography homework, his favourite adjective was probably “somewhat interesting” or “quite funny.
Chan Ka Keong and Ho Ka Weng (Chris) were both students at the time. Today, both have become professional graphic designers and photography artists. The former is also a film director and has produced film works such as Passing Rain; the latter is the core member of the Black and White Photography Society of Macau. Both of them were deeply influenced by Frank Lei.
Speaking of Lei Sir, what we enjoyed most was nothing more than the art of photography that he never actually explained, and the fact that his reluctance to talk indeed aroused our thinking.
“The slow speed with which he spoke was very important. If the teachers were teaching Kung Fu, then his style must be Tai Chi,” says Ka Keong.
“He did not speak very well, but he created an atmosphere that encouraged us to the pursuit of art,” adds Chris. “He could always accurately point out some areas of our photography homework that was worth developing and paying attention to. This impressed me a lot.”
I also clearly remember that Lei Sir once screened an art documentary in class which he had recorded in France. The protagonist of the documentary was a blind photographer. In an interview in the film, the reporter asked him that if as a blind man, he could not see his own work, what then was the significance of his photography? The artist answered that for him photography was a tool, it was a method to transcend himself. He could not see the artworks himself, but he could create works that others could appreciate. This was the meaning of his photography. As far as I remember, Lei Sir did not add much more to the content expressed in the film. I only remember him saying to us, “If a blind man can do photography, there must be a lot more things you can do.”
In this way, looking at him with a plain smile without further explanations, our young spirits were guided into the inexplicable atmosphere of artistic freedom and education that Frank brought us.
Ng Fong Chao is a Macau performance and photography artist; a curator of the Art Museum and the current chairman of the Ox Warehouse. He has known Frank Lei for 26 years and was also his photography student.
“Interestingly, although Lei Sir was not a silver-tongued speaker, when we read his articles published in newspapers every week, we found that his texts were eloquently articulated and seemed to be very different from the way he usually spoke,” he notes.
The photographic works and articles published by Frank Lei in the photography section of the newspaper were later compiled into a book entitled Walking while Watching.
“Sometimes a sentence of a teacher can influence the student for his whole life,” says Fong Chao. “I remember he once said that a good photographic work must be able to stand the test of time, something that you would go back and look at without getting bored, but it is not necessarily due to any visual effects.”
Chan Ka Keong recalls a photography exhibition of Frank Lei entitled “On the Road” organised at the Polytechnic Institute, and how he liked his photography.
“His photos don't have very exciting or provocative visual compositions, but they are full of details,” he comments. “It is as if he gave us an eye for viewing the world, allowing people to savour the details and discover something from them. And during those days there was no Internet, people had slower ways to obtain information. The ideas that I learned from Lei Sir always made me ponder for several days. Compared with the current era of information explosion, we received less information at that time, but the impact was more profound. This way of transmission is a luxury and extremely precious compared to the current flood of information.”
Frank Lei was born in Beijing in 1962 and moved to Macau when he was ten years old. In the 1980s, he studied Journalism in Guangzhou. After returning to Macau, he worked as a newspaper reporter. Later, because of his passion for French New Wave films, he decided to quit his job and study in France in 1986. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Film from the Third University of Paris, and later graduated from the photography department of the famous École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris. After eight years of studying in France, Frank returned to Macau in 1994 to start his photography teaching life at the Polytechnic Institute.
He is a well-known art and cultural educator and activist in Macau. He founded the Comuna de Pedra in 1996, the Old Ladies House Art Space in 2001, established the Macau Ox Warehouse in 2003, and worked as the artistic director of the Ox Warehouse. However, in 2017, he underwent major surgery due to a physical health condition, and sadly he still remains in the nursing unit of the hospital until now.
Before writing this article, I visited Lei Sir at the hospital. He was lying on a bed and was still unable to speak. He stared at me with wide open eyes, as if he had a thousand words to say, but yet did not utter any. In the moment when the air was silent, I was wondering what the teacher was thinking. His eyes appeared to be sharp and stubborn. Did he mean to tell me that even though the world was changing, for better or worse, he would never give up his ideals? Or in the unspeakable space, he has already seen through the blanks that he never intentionally left?
Whatever comes with fate; will be gone with fate.
