OPINION – A Christmas present worth having

Macau Business | December 2022

Keith Morrison – Author and educationist


When the casino resorts applied for the first licenses to operate in Macau, one of the commitments that they made was to serve the Macau society. Many of them have honoured those commitments outstandingly well, and continue to do so, and in ways too many and diverse to list here.

Serving Macau society means not only giving it what it wants but what it needs in order to sustain and renew itself. This is not only an economic matter of promoting business, jobs, money, training, and so on. Rather, it is about the whole person, engaging, developing, and nurturing a profound humanity, inner creativity, the living of a deeply authentic and passionate life, with recognition and respect for individualism. This is essential in a society such as Macau, which is in grip of materialism, slogans, superficiality, trivial entertainment, bureaucracy, routine living, control mentalities and behaviours, and restrictive, unyielding conformity that creates passive, obedient, compliant robots, and destroys people’s creative, reflective, inner spirit from an early age. For real, sustainable development, Macau needs the disruptive thinking and practices that real creativity brings.

How, then, can the casino resorts serve society in catalysing the development of the deep humanity, creativity, individual existential authenticity that Macau so urgently needs, and which leaves materialism paling into insignificance?

One of the most striking and outstanding examples of such service in Macau is not the megaphone trumpeting of kitsch, glitz, and would-be glamour throughout Macau. No, it is much more subtle and penetrating than this, an example of which is currently provided by the Galaxy Entertainment Group Foundation. Tucked away in an upstairs, calm corner of one of its shopping malls is the carefully arranged and poignant ‘5 a.m. oil painting exhibition’ of the work of the local artist Leo Yuen Wai Ip, which runs to February 2023 (see https://www.gegfoundation.org.mo/exhibitions/5am). You will have to visit it to understand its title!

Go there. This exhibition is stunning, and it is like a break of fresh, clean air in Macau; it is the best thing for years in Macau. It grabs you and keeps you fixated on the paintings. It stops you in your tracks with its thoughtfulness, depth, and beauty. It draws you in, deeper and deeper into the artist’s world, and makes you to look at yourself afresh in redeeming your innermost thoughts. The paintings are rooted in several dimensions of Macau, painted over many years of the artist’s life and testifying to his own changes and the experiences which have shaped his life. They are deeply personal yet catch universal values, emotions, behaviours, challenges, and experiences, in the particular and the personal. These universals take form in individual paintings (e.g. ‘Ceremonial Fire’, depicting a world in which peace prevails) and in sets of pictures on a particular theme (e.g. ‘The Four Gentlemen’ in Chinese culture), all of which are rich in symbolism and imagery.

On the visits that I made to the exhibition, we were taken round the exhibits, painting by painting, by the organiser Florence Lam and, indeed, by the artist himself, Leo Yuen Wai Ip, who talked with us, explaining evocatively and movingly the many points about each painting. Leo is a very rare, sincere, wonderful man, and I was overcome with his honesty and modesty; this touched me the most, and are caught so disturbingly well in his paintings. For the first time in years, here on display were purity, sincerity, genuine creativity, humanity, and brilliance, heart and soul. I was touched beyond words. It took me back to when I visited the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam; such exhibitions change people for ever. They put into the shade all matters of materialism, superficiality, bureaucracy, unthinking routine, the thirst for power and control, the press for stability, conformity, passive obedience, and compliance. They make life worth living, if you are prepared to think about it deeply, and often in solitude. As the poet Pasternak put it: ‘I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood. Life is not a walk across a field’.

Now this is what we need in Macau, going far beyond the humdrum and fleeting, superficial materialism. Sustainability needs humanity, inner creativity, living an authentic, sincere, meaningful, and passionate life. These matter. Visit the exhibition; reflect on it, on yourself. It is a Christmas present of a lifetime.