>> neon light, wire, paper, mirror, light bulbs, spotlights

“This is the reason for this journey into hyper-reality, in search of instances where the imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred.”
from “Travels in Hyper-Reality, Faith in Fakes” by Umberto Eco
As everyone knows, today Macao develops in an irresistible rate. There are numerous splendid emulations of real world established around every corner of the city, like a serious infectious disease. In the essay of “Travels in Hyper-Reality”, Umberto Eco mentioned about the emulation of real word is fascinating in Disney. Visitors are self-forgetful unconsciously in it and believe it is a real world. Eco similarly finds, “Disneyland is also as place of total passivity. Its visitors must agree to behave like robots.”

A fantastic and strange looking, but overpowering and inescapable “hype-reality”, which has been constructed with a meretricious mask, influences gradually on our thoughts, deceives our sense and instills an illusory and stimulating experience into us. We have become one part of the reproduction and the fake phenomenon. It looks like we are in the space of “virtual-reality” created by computer; our perception and thinking way are conducted.

Eco declared that the boundary between the real world and the fantastic space is vague and referred to “hyper-reality” threatens to cut us off from the realities of existence. Today, we all are on the journey in hyper-reality. In the real and false environment, how we could search for a lead that will allow us to identify the object of this pilgrimage?

After the work of “large-scale construction”, “under the neon light”, “games” and “to make your bet!” I continue to explore the boundary between illusion and reality under the distinctive phenomenon of Macao at present. The work will form a weightless, dazzling and fascinating space with the fake door and window made of neon light, the structures of “luxurious ornament” (likes a new model of building, castle or scattering flower) and the shaking light and shadow. It tries to present the reality of a place under the so-called “fakes”.

exhibition:

2007  “Place – Act II, Exhibition of Macao Contemporary Art”, Macao.