This event has ended
"Contemplating Still Life" is the final installment of the Macau Art For All Society's (AFA) 2023 annual thematic exhibition series "Seeing / Unseeing – Imagery Art." The solo exhibition by Lui Chak Keong opened on April 13, 2024, at the Macau Portuguese Bookstore Gallery.
Lui Chak Keong, born in Macau in 1971, is a renowned Macau scholar, architect, and artist. He graduated from the Lisbon School of Architecture in Portugal in 1999. From 2003 to 2005, he studied and completed a professional course on the conservation, restoration, preservation, and adaptive reuse of historical buildings and urban areas at the Centre des Hautes Études des Chaillot in Paris, France. He obtained the qualification of a French Heritage Architect, becoming the first Chinese architect to receive this French diploma and professional certification.
This solo exhibition organized by AFA showcases Lui's latest personal works, all of which are still-life paintings. While "still life" has been an element or subject in painting throughout history, it flourished uniquely as a distinct genre in European painting during the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age. Artists depicted a vast array of objects with remarkable variety and meticulous detail, ranging from ordinary bread and fruit to lavish seafood, oysters, and skulls. As a cultural heritage scholar, Lui Chak Keong begins from this historical vantage point, fixing his gaze upon "still life."
Lui's series of paintings encompasses a wide range of subjects: a philosopher's sculpture covered by a plastic bag, an ornate golden clock, playing cards, flowers, butterflies, glassware, ceramic plates, Portuguese blue azulejo tiles, oysters, ceramic vases, Chinese teacups, side tables, ancient maps of Macau, and old books. Much like Dutch still-life paintings from centuries ago, these silent objects convey a sense of local customs and culture.
Macau, as a centuries-old crossroads of Chinese and Western cultures, has been a site of rich, often exotic, mutual imagination. The exhibition invites reflection on Macau's complex history—as a Portuguese settlement, a coveted Asian trading post for the Dutch, and a community navigating competing interests. The artworks ponder transformation and permanence, questioning what is real and artificial, and exploring the essence of still-life painting through objects that endure.
The term "still life" originates from the Dutch "Stilleven." In French, it is translated as "Nature Morte" (literally "dead nature"). Lui, proficient in French, titles his series "Still Alive," consciously avoiding the word "death." Having passed the age of fifty and reflecting on recent personal loss, his work captures fleeting moments of time and life's passage. The viewer can imagine the artist in silent contemplation before the canvas, expressing emotion through vivid, contrasting colors.
The exhibition's Chinese title, "物觀" (Wu Guan), draws from the Northern Song dynasty philosopher Shao Yong's aesthetic concept of "observing things through things" (以物觀物). This philosophy advocates transcending personal subjectivity and emotion to achieve a more objective, enlightened perspective—a potential path to detachment from the ultimate pain of confronting mortality.
Guo Tianxi (Kuo Tien-hsi)
Art Exhibitions
