Avant-garde fashion concepts, colourful and dramatic make-up and hairstyles, and aesthetic images with surreal post-production effects all work playfully together to visualise the most inspiring hopes and dreams of Macau people in the local community-based art project “High Hoper!” by local association Point View Art.
“High Hoper!” is one of the year-round projects financially supported by “Arts in Community”, a subsidy programme of the Cultural Affairs Bureau. This is the first year the programme has been implemented and a total of ten local art groups have received support.
“The concept of community arts is green to Macau. Each art group might have its own ways of doing things, which is fine,” says Chiang Chen-Yun, the director of the ‘High Hoper!’ project. “What matters is that we have to do something that unites us and leads us to a better future.”
Her project aims to initiate a dialogue between the self and dreams through surreal graphic productions and artistic techniques.
Living in a highly commercial casino city, Chiang was very curious about what the hopes and aspirations of Macau people looked like. It appeared to her that Macau people had no dreams at all, but was this really so? What exactly are we after in life? She decided to explore this question and started to think about what she could do in her profession as a performing artist.
In collaboration with a range of artists from a variety of media backgrounds, Chiang formed her team made up of fashion designers, filmmakers, hairstylists, make-up artists, photographers and writers. They all had a common goal – to instil in audiences a collective sense of hope to discover their dreams.
In order to connect the project to the community as a whole, the team designed a questionnaire early this year to collect some data about the dreams of Macau people, and distributed it through social networking sites. The group was careful to mention that Macau dreams were not necessarily confined only to locals but included anyone living in Macau.
The team also invited high school students as volunteers to ask questions of passers-by in the street. The questions were simple and designed to encourage them to think further about the significance of having dreams and goals in life.
According to Chiang, the creative concept was inspired by renowned Spanish painter Salvador Dalí and presents our hopes and dreams in surreal ways so as to create more room for imagination. All the photos were taken in Macau and each scene was carefully selected – scenes which might otherwise be overlooked in our daily lives yet are very beautiful.
“They are the places not so many people have been to. Some people might not even be able to identify where they are,” she says. “We were very attentive to the ambience of the place. It had to go well with the content of the dreams.”
The team also paid particular attention to costume design. Nearly all the costumes were specially created for the project, designed to fit the character of peoples stated dreams and goals.
“We wanted our dreamers to dress in a very trendy and futuristic ways, rather than simply boring work uniforms. We believe that all dreamers will, after all, be masters of the future,” says Chiang.
“We don’t know how many people in the end will be thankful for our project and start to change their minds about things they have long thought to be essential,” she says. “What we do is to remind them of the danger of being overwhelmed by their routine lives.”
The group will hold their first exhibition at the gallery of the Rui Cunha Foundation in late July and it will also tour to a number of schools. Together with ten tailor-made costumes and photos, and the personal stories of the ten dreamers will be on display in the exhibition.
“We’ll have a sharing section afterwards. We want to tell students that their dreams are not beyond their reach as long as they have guts to chase after them.”
One of the group’s more ambitious plans is to wrap up bus no.25 from the inside out and turn it into a Macau ‘dream bus’. They’ve sent a proposal to the bus company and are now waiting for a reply.
The no.25 route goes around Macau from the border gate to Coloane and back. It connects people from many different areas of Macau, covering a vibrant spectrum of Macau’s population including manual labourers, regular 9-5ers, immigrant workers, students, Macanese, Chinese, Portuguese and other expats.
“To a certain extent, bus services are not merely a tool for commuting but also play a role in fostering cultural awareness,” says Chiang.
Chiang admits that the project was quite challenging in terms of the execution of the works.
“We had non-professional models working with us. They are all ‘dreamers’ we met for the first time for this project. Also, community art is quite weird and not common in Macau,” she notes. “But in foreign countries you see a lot either in magazines or reality shows.”
She also laments that there are only a handful of people developing community art in Macau.
“When no one realises and recognises its significance, no artists jump into that field and get trained for it,” she says. “Someone has to take the lead and bring up some ideas.”
“Most local artists often practice their skills for their own individual projects, rather than getting their work connected to the community in which they were born and raised,” Chiang says. “Most of them have full-time jobs and do art on an amateur basis. There is much room to learn as we are far behind other countries. Macau is still in the stage of figuring out what it is.”
