Mother Nature is on display in Macau in the form of 143 paintings, sculptures, installations and ceramics created by almost a hundred women from all over the world. For this year’s edition of ARTFEM 2020 Women Artists – Macau International Biennial, the organizers are presenting the works across four locations: the Albergue SCM, the Former Municipal Cattle Stable, Galeria Lisboa and Casa Garden.
The biennial started on September 30 and will stay in these galleries until December 13 to show works created by artists from 22 countries over the last two years. In addition to 31 artists from Macau, there are 13 from Mainland China, 16 from Portugal, seven from Hong Kong,three from Indonesia, three from Germany and two from North America.
ARTFEM is described by the organizers as “the only biennial exclusively of women artists in the world”, aiming to “create a unified exhibition in which all artists think personally about a topic of global relevance – the natural world – and second, to pay tribute to the fundamentalrole of women in raising awareness of the climate crisis that requires attention.”
A LIVING MANDALA
Alice Kok is one of the curators of the exhibition and was responsiblefor the space of the Former Municipal Cattle Stable, on Avenida Coronel Mesquita, the largest of the four galleries being used to present this year’s ARTFEM. Here, the biggest installations are on display and Alice says that it took four full days to get everything into the space.
The work that cost the most to assemble was a mandala that isplanted with green beans in the center of the space, created by Indonesian artist Arahmaiani.
“The artist’s idea was based on Tibetan mandalas. The mandala is a traditional design, and not only exists in Tibetan culture, but also in India and in Native American culture. It is a symmetric drawing that is supposed to represent the entire existence of the universe”.
The principle is to have a symmetrical piece that, in this case, the Indonesian artist decided to use as a seedbed to plant green beans, intersecting with the theme of the biennial, “Natura”. Arahmaiani lives and works in Yogyakarta and uses as inspiration the prejudice against women and the imbalance of the natural world.
“Women have an innate quality to take care of others, because we are mothers, we were born almost to be mothers and we were all born from a mother. The ideas of mothers and nature are closely linked,” explains Alice. On the situation of women in Macau, particularly in thearts, the curator says she doesn’t believe that there is a problem, but sheassumes: “In general, the world and society are still very patriarchal. Feminine energy can help balance things out and the biennial can help raise these kinds of issues. Femininity has a lot to offer,” she concludes.
OF BREAD AND WOOD
James Chu is president of the Macau Designers Association, director and founder of the Zhuhai-Macau Design Center and member of the China Art Society, and now also a curator
of ARTFEM.
Although he is not currently in Macau, he also highlights some pieces, this time at the Galeria Lisboa. Heavenly Eyes is by Chinese artist Jiang Miao, an “old friend” of James’. “I have seen her grow from student to artist, and now to world-class artist who has done very well in Asia, especially in Japan, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong”, he notes.
Jiang Miao works mostly with carved wood, where she applies layers of paint, “to form an impregnable combination of colours like precious stones underground. It is the most beautiful art of wood and colour that I have seen in recent
years, so I strongly recommended its inclusion in this biennial,” says James.
James also highlights a silicone sculpture, Good Morning Sadness, by Liao Wen, “an intelligent and courageous sculptor,” as the curator called her, which displays faces loaded with sadness presented on slices of bread. “These few slices of bread tell a story of life – life and death – happy and sad imagination,” Chu notes.
“The art of women and men is the same thing, but mostly in the world, especially in the artistic scene, men still run the empire. Nobody can change this situation in a short period of time, but the world changes faster than we can believe, so maybe in 100 years from now, women’s art will be more important than men’s art, who knows.”
INTERACTIVE ART
Art historian Leonor Veiga came from Portugal to be one of the curators of this edition of ARTFEM.
The Casa Garden Oriente Foundation exhibition features mostly interactive works, where “there is a relationship between the work and the person seeing the work,” she says.
Leonor first highlights Invariable Mountain, a piece by Macau artist Ho Weng Chi. “There is a line of jade made of pieces that look almost like ‘mahjong’ pieces. The artist uses the potentiality of jade to create a landscape like a traditional Chinese painting,” Leonor comments.
The art historian also mentions the work of American artist, Kirsten Berg. In Sacred Totem the artist uses found objects to make a sculpture that resembles a butterfly and the sacrum bone, “which is the first bone of your body that is formed when we are in the womb. It’s from there that we are all born, so there’s this butterfly-like image, because it’s the origin of our life and it’s the shape of the bone too,” she explains.
“It’s very common for men to get the spotlight in the art world, so it is so necessary to give institutional support only to women,” notes Leonor. “There’s still a lot to do,” she adds.
NUDE REALISM
Carlos Marreiros is the curator for the works on display at Albergue SCM, the cultural space that he manages. Of the 21 works exhibited here, Marreiros immediately highlightsa painting by one of the ‘Godmothers’ of this edition of ARTFEM, Un Chi Iam, a piece painted in 2008 that the Macau artist describes as her “dream scenario”.
“Un Chi Iam is a Shanghai artist who has been in Macau for almost 40 years, she has lived with great artists such as Liu Haisu, one of the great modernists of China’s renewal,”says Marreiros, adding that the painter brought “an enormous freshness to Macau in the 1980s. “She does an exercise in traditional Chinese painting, rice paper, and Chinese paints, but with a completely non-traditional discourse of great revelation, freshness and delicacy,” he adds.
In one of the rooms of the compound hangs a sculpture in silicone and fiberglass made by the South Korean artist residing in Macau, MJ Lee.
“MJ ‘scanned’ her body in three dimensions and produced this model,” explains Marreiros.bCarlos also highlights a work by Portuguese artist Cecilia Costa, who presents a piece of lingerie knitted from human hair, entitled The Gods Wear Lingerie. “It’s a funny piece, very ironic, and makes reference to intimate aspects of the gods,” he notes.
The other godmother of this edition of ARTFEM is Xiang Jing, a Beijing artist who created a sculpture of naked, bald woman located in the second gallery of Albergue SCM.
The curator and president of the ARTFEM organizing committee notes that Xiang Jing “is from the contemporary arts movement in China, she raises issues of intimacy, sexuality, social acceptance of women in China and the world. Her sculptures are of a fantastic realism, made of fiberglass and other materials and then painted.”
Marreiros says he dreamed of holding an exclusively female biennial for 20 years, “but I only managed to realize it two years ago.”
“At the moment in Macau, to our amazement, there seem to be more female artists than men, and even in disciplines like installations and sculpture. Things are reversing, fortunately in Macau there is this trend.”