Macau Matters | Tassie and MONA

Richard Whitfield

While recently visiting family and friends in Australia, a weekend visit to Tasmania (Tassie) and the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) was highly recommended. Fortunately, friends and I acted on it and had a great time.
Tasmania is the island state at the South East corner Australia. It is famous for agriculture, forestry and its natural beauty and has a total population similar to Macau, half of whom live in Hobart.  MONA is a very large private art museum that was established by one of Tasmania’s richest people who, interestingly, made his fortune from gambling.
Arriving at Hobart, our first pleasant surprise was our taxi driver, Bob, who pointed out many sights and explained many things on the ride in from the airport. Generally, everybody we met was very friendly, pleasant and knowledgeable about Tasmania, and full of ideas of things to see and do – this is a very good thing for a place dependent on tourism, and something we could do with much more in Macau.
We then spent a very pleasant hour at the Salamanca Market which is held every Saturday on the waterfront in downtown Hobart. It was full of very high quality local boutique foods and farm produce. Again, markets are something we do very poorly in Macau – they are full of the same mass produced junk with little character or local flair. Even the dried meats and other typical local foods are very limited in their range, and there is no innovation or creativity in what is offered by different vendors.
The next great surprise was MONA itself which is a great model for museums of the future, and a venue that Macau museums should learn from. Their focus is very much on a total visitor experience that mixes art with other things. The MONA experience starts with it being a 30 minute luxury ferry ride from Hobart. I have several times mentioned to various people that there should be a regular ferry service circumnavigating Taipa and Coloane with drop-offs and pick-ups at all the interesting places along the way. The idea is to create a sense of destination and adventure, which works very well for MONA.
MONA is located in a large cavern carved into a sandstone cliff. Internally it is divided into many floors and rooms inter-connected by walkways and steps with many places to look at the different display spaces from different directions. This creates a very dramatic backdrop for the art. Also, visitors are actively encouraged to take photos and post them on social media to create “buzz” about the museum. There are no labels on any of the works, and visitors use supplied iPads to view menus of “nearby art” which can be clicked on to learn about each work. Before returning the device, visitors can “save” their tour and information about what they saw is subsequently delivered to them by email. Macau museums should definitely investigate developing apps with similar functionality that can be downloaded and used by visitors.
The MONA complex also has a working vineyard, boutique hotel, restaurants, bars, open-air performance spaces and outdoor gardens that can all be used and enjoyed by visitors. To increase interest and return visits, MONA helps organize several festivals in Hobart at different times of the year. We are starting to see some of this in Macau but the festivals here are not really integrated, nor are they tied in with museums.
Some of the museums we have locally are good, but by learning from international best practice and integrating themselves with other community festivals and events they could become a much more important part of the tourist’s experience of Macau.