Local artist Chiang Wai Lan has opened her fourth solo exhibition at the UNESCO Centre of Macao, exhibiting 45 pieces or sets of her paintings.
The exhibition will run until February 13.
Chiang is the 16th artist to exhibit under the Macao Foundation’s (FM) Macao Young Artist Promotion Project.
She hopes to share society’s delicate emotional stories with the public through her exhibited works that resemble fairy tales. In her speech, she said “fairy tales”, as a tangible image of happiness, imply a variety of intertwined memories, hopes and desires.
In recent years, she has held two different solo exhibitions in Macau and South Korea with the titles “Once Upon A Time” and “Fairy Tale Specimen” respectively. Through the creation of concrete narratives, she conveys memories and happiness via fairy tales, placing them in binary opposition but separated by a line, or displaying them in a showroom set to be admired.
This exhibition, entitled “Fairy Tell”, continues this formational direction. It uses artistic creations to depict forgotten moments and the purity and beauty in life. It explores how these stories were conceived at a certain time, conveying them via a visual narrative contrasting illusion and reality, imagination and memory, as well as sweetness and bitterness.
There are many artistic platforms for exhibitions in Macau, and there is still room for expansion in the commercial art market in Macau, Chiang said on the sidelines of the exhibition’s opening ceremony.
She believes the FM’s Young Artist Promotion Project will provide new avenues for discovery and promotion and resources for artists. By collecting the works of young artists, it will further promote the creative power and presence of young artists in Macau to the Greater Bay Area and the world. In this way, she thinks the project will help foster the development of the arts in Macau.
There are five themes in this exhibition, namely “Stories of…”, “Seek and Find”, “Home: Scenic Ballad”, “Seeing Flowers” and “Rhythmic Movements”. The first theme is both a recollection of Chiang’s previously explored themes and the preamble for new themes she sees as new chapters. The rest, on the other hand, are independent yet interconnected chapters, which exist together as an indivisible whole in this exhibition.
According to the artist, in this fourth solo exhibition, Chiang re-examines and digests past creations, turning them into fodder for the future of her life.
Those emotional stories she considers the most subtle and delicate are presented in this exhibition, perceived as fairy tales.
At the opening of the exhibition, the FM explained the National Arts Fund supports the Macao Young Artist Promotion Project, and projects applying for subsidies will be vetted alongside the national fund. The FM said it would help ensure high standards and quality.
