The first thing I notice as I step into the casino is the increase in people. Three years ago when I visited Macau, the departure hall was quiet, a few neat businessmen and a scattering of tourists sat somberly on its metal chairs. Now there is a long ragged queue for the immigration gate, large groups of people jostling about, moving impatiently between queues, weighed down with shopping. As we pass through it becomes even more chaotic, harassed officials waving their radios, vainly trying to shepherd different groups to the right gates. They rush about frantically, wheeling their small cases around like puppies behind them. The air echoes with the shouts, the clamor of mandarin and Cantonese. This is a new, restless China, freed from the constraints of financial struggle and suddenly, uncertainly on the move. Where are these people going? Some to Macau to gamble, some to do business in the mainland or back from business in Hong Kong, some just tourists. Money drives their movement, getting new money or spending new money already got. Ferries depart every 15 minutes, each hauling over 300 people across to Macau. At busy times, particularly weekends and holidays, it becomes impossible to get a seat.
Walking into the immense lobby of the Sands casino, you feel as though you are stepping into some strange parody of a church. In the past, only religious buildings offered such a huge space devoted to one activity. Everything beneath the spiritual glow is glossy plastic and flashing lights. Row after row of tables line up like a futuristic army, stretching out their arms of lights, each one an isolated cell of activity. There is a strong sense of unreality, everything carefully stages and crafted to have an immediate effect. It feels theatrical, all surface with no depth. This is perhaps true of casinos everywhere in the world, but here the effect seems heightened. Nobody in the casino appears quite comfortable with their role – like actors crudely playing parts.
The attendants and croupier act out their roles unnaturally. When the security lady checks my bag, she does it with strange, automatic gestures. I try to take a photo and one of the attendants – positioned everywhere – comes to tell me not to. He does it uncertainly and I sense that he’s not quite used to this smart uniform, this officialdom, voicing the company policy without quite meaning (maybe even understanding) it. It is hard to take him seriously and from then on I make it my challenge to get as many photos as I can. All these workers have perhaps been dragged from ragged roles on the mainland. They still show their displacement. Looking dazed by the glitz of the casino with its bright lights. I thank them in Cantonese, Macau’s normal language, and they look at me bemused.
The customers at the tables don’t seem much better. They are not the tycoons you see puffing cigars in Vegas, young wives draped beside them, their wealth sunk into their skin. These figures wealth is new, this gambling pose like a costume they wear uncertainly. Many can’t help still smoking with cigarettes dangling from their bottom lips, or spitting into the waste bins. Some wear ill fitting suits, others still in scruffier clothes. Others stumble around like excited tourists at Disneyland, dazzled by this magic world and unable to contain their awe.
A lot of the gaming here seems more leisure based than the seriousness in Vegas. People really seem to be having fun as they gamble, with groups who all know each other gathered round tables shouting. It’s a striking contrast from the surly, serious faces I can remember in Vegas. There’s a surprising number of women gambling too – in groups on their own, or alongside their husbands – what look like housewives or young wives.
On the main stage a show starts – a sort of sanitized erotic show. Like the rest of the decoration it takes and then and draws all the substance out of it. It is simply surface erotica, tight clothes, and exposed skin. Western girls in black underwear and push up tops thrust their hips forward, moving like strippers – but again a false copy. Replicating something always destroys its value. The music’s lyrics are raunchy – don’t you wish your girlfriend looked just like me – but probably not understood by most here. There is grotesqueness to all of this – so suggestive without any substance. Its only 8pm, but casinos are deliberately timeless.
The Chinese young men gawp at these women, sipping at watery beers from the bar. They are probably unused to such decadent, mainstream references to sex. The female waitresses, themselves heavily made up, watch the show from behind a little uncertainly. All this is such a stark contrast from the traditional moralistic attitudes which still hang their shadows over China. I see the women on stage as synecdoche of how art is made to prostitute itself in the casino, subserviently serving the financial aim of making people gamble more.
At Macau’s Museum of Art is ‘space’ an exhibition by local artists, many of whom respond in powerful, intriguing ways to the current developments. One artist has replicated the window cages common in poorer parts of Macau. This at once draws attention to and records the older, original culture of Macau. It shows how it has value, the everyday architecture representing a way of life. At the same time, it exposes the flaws with this. Poor people have these boxes because their homes aren’t secure any other way. They are trapped by their poverty, having to construct cages around them. An entrapping, close, claustrophobic way of life.
A video installation by Kent Ieong shows images of a bay, at first undeveloped, slowly gaining more buildings as the images flick by. It captures the value a landscape can have, just from its simple shape. In the foreground are figures, indicating how a landscape acts as a stage for human experiences. The images act like photos – offering memories of something which might be lost. A lot have parents and children, symbolically representing passing down from generation to generation, with Children as the future. Yet many of these figures are like advert images, perhaps symbolizing the unreality of our memories, of our ideas of place and time.
Other sculptures use neon, so distinct in Macau now. One has a box with neon working a door and window on it. These have no function, they are just a surface. You cannot enter through the door, or pass through the window. They are just surface like much of the decoration in the casinos. The rest of the house is dark empty walls, suggesting how Macau is buried by this flare. The ironic name ‘Well Known City’ draws attention to how Macau is becoming world famous, but raises questions about what this notoriety is based upon. Is it just glare like the neon? As you step close, you hear the harsh hum of the neon and feel its glare – normally you can’t get this close- allowing you perhaps to see the more damaging effects of this light show.
Inside the house, a gaudy chandelier, decked out with false crystal flashes different patterns of light. Placed at the heart of this house, this is its core – it represents the unreality manifested outside. Its shifting patterns of light are beautiful but ephemeral, they do not really exist or having lasting impact, but always change.
I am also struck by photographs from the Venice Biennale. Konstantin has made a ‘flightless plane’ – resembling the type of things people enter in birdman contests. Stuffed full of kitsch, casino styled decoration – it represents the ‘flightless’ dreams of wealth harbored by those who visit the casinos and the kitsch decoration they eat up. Another photo shows an artist who has made replicas of the stone works from Macau’s temples. The artist wants to show the value of this heritage, threatened by the Casino’s now – how such art is equal to the Venetian monuments often exported to Macau.
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