Macao 澳门

For the last fifteen years, I have photographed the former Portuguese colony of Macao (now a Special Administrative Region of China) and witnessed its transformation from a small enclave into a gambling Mecca. 

Soon after the handover from Portuguese control to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, Macao’s casino industry which, until then was monopolized by Hong Kong businessman Stanley Ho, was opened to foreign investment.  Since then, Macao has been busily trying to place itself as the gaming and leisure destination for, not just China, but all of Asia.  As of 2007 Macao had usurped the Las Vegas Strip as the most valuable piece of gambling real estate in the world.  By 2013 Macao outpaced Las Vegas by about seven times. Since then Macao has struggled to maintain this level of growth and even seen a substantial decline in revenue largely due to Chinese government restrictions on travel and a crackdown on Mainland corruption.  I was curious if these recent declines in fortune were evident from the street level. 

While these economic factors are literally written into the landscape of the territory, the idiosyncratic nature of a place where multiple histories intersect remains.  Despite the tendency of huge commercial spaces spaces such as hotels and casinos to obliterate unique local culture in favor of bland international consumer culture, Macao remains a location that is hard to define as any one ‘kind’ of place.

Beyond presenting Macao as a site of physical, cultural and political change, these pictures attempt to navigate a territory of conflicting perceptions inherent in the movement from historical city to phantasmagorical dreamscape.  In doing so, they present Macao as existing somewhere between a reflection of an internal architecture and that of a physical reality.

*All work in this series is shot on 4×5” film and printed as 30×40” archival inkjet prints in editions of five

在过去的十五年里，我拍摄了前葡萄牙殖民地澳门（现为中国的特别行政区）并见证了它从一个小飞地变成了赌博之都的转变。

在1999年从葡萄牙控制移交给中华人民共和国后不久，澳门的赌场行业，直到那时都被香港商人何鸿燊垄断，开始对外资开放。从那时起，澳门一直在努力将自己定位为不仅是中国，而且是整个亚洲的游戏和休闲目的地。到2007年，澳门已经取代了拉斯维加斯大道，成为世界上最有价值的赌博地产。到2013年，澳门的增长速度大约是拉斯维加斯的七倍。从那时起，澳门努力维持这种增长水平，甚至由于中国政府对旅行的限制和对大陆腐败的打击，收入大幅下降。我很好奇这些最近的财富下降是否从街道层面上看得出来。

虽然这些经济因素实际上写入了这个领土的景观，但多个历史交汇的地方的特殊性质仍然存在。尽管像酒店和赌场这样的巨大商业空间有消灭独特的本地文化，转而支持平淡的国际消费文化的倾向，但澳门仍然是一个很难定义为任何一种“类型”的地方。

除了将澳门呈现为一个物理、文化和政治变化的地方，这些图片还试图导航一个从历史城市到幻想景观的转变中固有的冲突感知领域。在这样做的过程中，它们将澳门呈现为介于内部建筑的反映和物理现实之间的某个地方。