Walking Culture – Outdoor and Indoor Collective Exhibition

Taipa Village Cultural Association is delighted to present the first show of the year, entitled “Walking Culture – Outdoor and Indoor Collective Exhibition”, in collaboration with thirteen Macau and international artists who hosted exhibitions at Taipa Village Art Space between 2016 and 2020. A diverse collection of artworks hand-picked by the artists, the exhibition features paintings, illustrations, photography, movie posters, zines and more.

As a distinctive art showcase for Taipa Village Cultural Association’s past few years, this breakout exhibition brings together a unique combination of outdoor art installations and interior displays of selected works by thirteen individual and collaborative talents from Macau and across the world, creating a visual spectacle richly endowed with cultural heritage, interactivity and art appreciation. Going beyond a conventional indoor display, the experience takes art-lovers outdoors, enticing them to stroll among the heritage spots and historic lanes of Taipa Village as they explore the culture, the charm and the distinctive atmosphere of the district.

Notable artists featured in the exhibition include: graffiti pioneer P.I.B.G.; photographic artists Hugo Teixeira and Chan Hin Io; illustration and visual artists Fan Sai Hong, Ana Aragão, Un Chi Wai and Rui Rasquinho; renowned master painter Lio Man Cheong; mixed-media artists Tong Chong, Allen Wong, and Bonnie Leong & Kitty Leung; film director and producer Maxim Bessmertny; and indie publishing collective ZINECOOP HK.

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Allen Wong Soi Lon

Allen Wong is a local established artist who privileges experimentation with a variety of traditional medium and unconventional supports derived from found objects, ranging from oil painting, recyclable egg cartons, rubber tire sculptures to video installations. His works tend to look into his inner beliefs in order to make sense of the daily contradictions, overcome life’s struggles, surpass moral obstacles and progress with his artistic ambitions. It is a continuous search for freedom of thought and how to maintain the strength of identity.

Ana Aragão

Ana Aragão has a background in architecture but builds her dream houses in illustrations and paintings. Fascinated by cities and their real or imaginary representations, Ana draws a lot! Constantly intrigued by the mental and emotional maps that arise from everyday experiences, she explores that obsession either through the finest lines or by means of a full bright and colourful palette. After all, cities are not just about buildings but also about the people who inhabit them, making them human and alive.

Bonnie Leong / Kitty Leung

Bonnie and Kitty are sisters and, although they have their individual artistic careers, many times they present their work as a duo. The success of their unique collaboration seems to rest on two intrinsic aspects: the coherence of works displayed in each show, as if it was produced by one sole person, and the clear manifestation of female sensitivity to address the theme they set to explore.

Chan Hin Io

Chan Hin Io is one of the most prolific, self-motivated and versatile freelance photographers in the territory, focusing intensely on people, events, and heritage sites, as well as tracking the urban development of his beloved city of Macau.  His images encapsulate the social dynamics that constitute the pulse of a city.

Fan Sai Hong

 Hong explores a wide range of drawing styles, reflecting his mood at each specific period in time, such as his involvement in different lines of work, learning different skills, travelling and dwelling in foreign landscapes, and testing himself in other forms of art. His sketchbook drawings are fundamentally biographical, a direct outcome of his state of mind at a circumstantial event of his life, which evolve and change organically as Hong grows older.

Hugo Teixeira

Teixeira fuses the photographs using a montage process reminiscent of 19^th century landscape photographers who combined unrelated photos of land and sky to create harmonious compositions not achievable in a single exposure. His artwork relies on photography, common materials, advanced technical skillsets and memory to create contemporary conceptual images that are inspired from his migrant background, juxtaposing crafted landscapes to manifest his personal experience.

Lio Man Cheong

Lio Man Cheong is a master painter, specialized in the medium of watercolour and oil paint. He lives and breathes the serenity of his paintings. In his paintings, light and colour continuously exercise a dialogue of courtesy – a sensuous playfulness in which the whiteness of the paper reveals itself as a bonding element, just like the silent pauses in a conversation between two old friends are the extension of their mutual respect. One could infer that the main subject of his paintings dwells on space, time, memory and people.

Maxim Bessmertny

Maxim is a Macau-based Russian-born film director, screenwriter and producer. He founded Pontus Maximus Productions, an independent film company that co-produces, writes and directs many of his narrative short films. His multicultural and multilingual exposure combined with a prolific knowledge of music, literature, history and art has led to a unique worldview evident in his storytelling. Employing humor, dramatic characterisation and social satire, Maxim’s works require revisiting time and time again.

P.I.B.G. 

P.I.B.G. has been creating graffiti since the late 1990s. He founded Macau’s first graffiti art group, GANTZ5, with like-minded fellow artists and has become one of the most influential art collectives on China’s graffiti scene. His work blurs the boundaries between two distinct worlds relating to art, space, morality and social issues and attempts to reconcile these often conflicting and contradictory spheres by deploying a range of antagonistic concepts that convey the sense that art is what matters.

Rui Rasquinho

Rui Rasquinho is an illustrator and visual artist based in Macau and Lisbon. He regularly publishes illustration work in magazines, newspapers and books. He also exhibits and works with drawing, painting and video, researching possibilities between abstraction and figuration, the nature of process and the porosity between media. Recently he has been exploring the conceptual mechanisms of the act of drawing and its implications on aural contexts.

Tong Chong

Tong Chong is an accomplished artist, best known for his paintings of an unmistakably naïve style, marked by an economy of means, and wooden sculptures depicting fictional creatures and other figurative forms derived from natural wood block. His works strongly reflect and explore modern social culture and the living ways of human beings, emphasising on the return to nature of humanity and orientating the role, as well as demonstrating human behaviour in modern society.

Un Chi Wai

Un Chi Wai is a young, independent and talented local illustration artist, self-motivated and with an astute sense to generate narratives and characters upon which his illustrations are based. His illustrations and picture books are characterized by an open ending subject for the reader’s own interpretation and imagination, hence making it also an entertaining read for parents and grownups.

ZINECOOP HK

ZINECOOP is a Hong Kong-based art organisation that promotes local zine culture. They link zinesters, book fairs, zine stores and readers altogether, as well as supporting zine making and distributing. “ZINE” is derived from “magazine”, a short form of “fanzine”.  It is a handmade, low-cost and low circulated publication which features different topics regarding the society, daily life and many other related issues.  The content is reflected in the form of text, sketches, images, diagrams, photos and illustrations.

Curator’s Statement

 This collective exhibition is more than an art show: it is a celebration dedicated to Taipa Village, its dwellers, cultural charm, colourful history and unique heritage. For this special occasion, we took the art show outdoors, in which all thirteen invited artists are individually featured on large-scale outdoor banners, comprising an informative layout and an enlarged image of their art work. The banners are randomly scattered around the village, prompting a surprise encounter with the visitors who stroll around. A caricature map of the village is specially designed to inform visitors of the location of the artworks and guide them on a cultural and leisure walking tour.

On the other hand, indoors, the art space will feature the original art works to stimulate and excite our beloved collectors. The variety of works represents each artist’s habitual medium of expression, where the array of techniques ranges from printed zines, cinema posters, naïve collage, graffiti, Chinese ink, watercolour, printmaking, ambrotype and photography. In a few words the spirit of Taipa Village Art Space would be: “We believe in talent yet to be discovered, nurture experimentation and promote cultural exchange.”

Participating artists (by order of exhibition shown at Taipa Village Art Space): P.I.B.G, Hugo Teixeira, Fan Sai Hong, Tong Chong, Allen Wong, Ana Aragão, Maxim Bessmertny, Lio Man Cheong, Chan Hin Io, Zinecoop (Hong Kong), Un Chi Wai, Bonnie Leong & Kitty Leung and Rui Rasquinho.

João Ó

Organiser 

Curator 

João Ó

Art Consultant