VENICE.- The exhibition from Macau, China, at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia opened on May 9th, marking the city's tenth participation as a collateral event in one of world's most prestigious art events, a presence it has held since 2007.
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Macao: Parallel Worlds
By Wang Shu
A visually rich volume exploring Macao through architecture, urban space, memory, and the layered coexistence of past and present.
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Titled Jacone's Polyphony, the exhibition traces the life of Wu Li (known by his Portuguese name Jacone) and his cultural intersections with Macao. A Qing dynasty painter who stood at the crossroads of East and West, his reverberations now reach the shores of the Adriatic, forging an unexpected resonance between two water cities — Macao and Venice.
Curated by Feng Yan and Ng Sio Ieng, the show’s narrative grew from a shortlisted proposal from the 2025 Macao Biennale’s Local Curatorial Project. Following a redesign and fresh selection process, three artists present newly commissioned works at this show — O Chi Wai and Lei Fong Ieng, both participated in the Macao Biennale previously, while Eric Fok joins for the first time.
Wu Li was, by any measure, a man of dramatic contradictions. A celebrated painter and poet from Changshu, Jiangnan (now Jiangsu Province), he left his hometown for the first time to travel north to the imperial capital around the age forty.
There, missionary activity had been revived after a century of periodical suppression by the Qing court, and the ancient city was suffused with the spirit of Western culture. The experience broadened his horizons profoundly, brought him into contact with Catholicism, and led him to seek baptism.
During the Kangxi reign, he sailed south with missionary Philippe Couplet, bound for Macao, intending to embark from there on a voyage to Rome. His advancing age, however, brought the journey to a halt at the water's edge, and he remained in Macao for a time.
By the time Wu Li arrived in 1681, Macao had already undergone a century of transformation into something the world had never quite seen before — a port connecting Malacca to Nagasaki, a waystation for missionaries and merchants alike, a city where incense and gunpowder, Portuguese and Cantonese formed an uneasy yet generative coexistence.
Wu enrolled at St. Paul's College, reputed to be the first Western institution of higher learning in East Asia, studying theology and Latin while something stranger and remarkable was happening in his brushwork.
Out of that immersion came San Ba Ji (Collection of Poems about St. Paul's), an album that braids classical Chinese literati forms with Christian devotion — nature, faith, and the slow walk toward priesthood, all held in the same breath. Somewhere in its pages, Wu Li dreams of Rome. He never gets there.
This unfinished journey, combined with the spatial character of the Macao exhibition's venue, forms the narrative framework of the exhibition — presenting the Wu Li-centred story along a linear path through the space.
Working across painting, installation, and video, the three artists don't simply illustrate Wu's story — they reconstruct it, elevate it, translate it into a contemporary language in which East and West are still mid-sentence.
Numbered among the "Six Masters of Early Qing,” Wu's own painting had spent a lifetime doing the same. He absorbed Western techniques — chiaroscuro, three-dimensionality, compositional depth — into the body of Chinese ink painting, producing a style that belongs fully to neither tradition and entirely to itself.
Eric Fok, who first came to international attention when his work was selected for the Bologna Illustrators Exhibition in 2013, channels that synthesis into his own practice.
The exhibition begins the moment visitors step into the courtyard. Wu Li bore the sobriquet "Mojing Daoren" (the Hermit of the Ink Well) — a name that expressed his reverence for the historical and cultural traditions of his hometown, Changshu.
The courtyard of the Macao exhibition in Venice happens to contain a circular pool, and it was this coincidence that sparked Fok's imagination.
The installation Layers of Time, takes shape as six laser-engraved bamboo-steel panels arranged into the form of a well.
Drawing on Wu Li's compositional sensibility and pictorial atmosphere, and fusing these with his own signature cartographic style, the work simultaneously evokes landscape and atmosphere while tracing — in a metaphysical register — Wu Li's life before his arrival in Macao, laying a foundation for the journey that follows. The colour of the bamboo steel recalls the traditional Chinese bamboo scroll — one of humanity's earliest writing surfaces.
His second work, Silent Travelogues, uses bamboo-steel screens as its medium, embedding AI-animated imagery to construct an imaginative narrative built upon the skeletal framework of a Western nautical charts.
Taking as his reference the European itinerary of Shen Fuzong — a cross-cultural pioneer of Wu Li's era — Fok speculates on what Wu Li's own European journey might have looked like. The route Wu Li planned but never travelled is laser-transferred onto the screen installation. The panels divide the space, and peepholes in the bamboo allow visitors to glimpse the screens within, where the artist's drawings are brought to life through AI animation, a contemporary completion of Wu Li's unfinished voyage.
In Wu Li's century, the Age of Sail was continuously redrawing the boundaries of the known world, filling in the blank spaces on maps one by one, and Macao was among the first cities in the East to be charted by European navigators. The screens themselves quietly hold this tension: a form rooted in the domestic spaces of Chinese tradition, now given the charge of sailing outward — inviting viewers to look through Wu Li's eyes and find, on the other side, a meaning of their own.
Wu’s longing finds a different material form in Veronica Lei's Sigh of Migration. Lei, herself Catholic, chose Rua dos Curtidores — believed to be Wu Li's first lodging place in Macao — as her studio, letting the address become part of the work before a single piece was made. She then built scale models of the building from aluminium foil and dripped candle wax over them: structures that hold their shape while visibly giving way, catching light the way memory does. The result is less documentation than elegy — fragile forms suspended between historical fact and personal devotion, asking where one person's spiritual migration ends and another's begins.
O Chi Wai comes at Wu Li differently — not through material but through movement. His method is walking: through the places Wu Li lived, the routes he travelled, the gaps where the record runs thin. Along the way, Chi Wai gathers local memories and interpretations of Wu Li, folding collective recollection into his own, until the line between research and imagination starts to dissolve.
The work, Sanqu (A Cappella Reverie), that emerges from this process, made in collaboration with Water Singers — a Macao-based music ensemble — takes Wu Li's Tianyue Zhengyin Pu (Compendium of Orthodox Sounds of Heavenly Music) as its departure point. Together, they recast it as a modern interpretation of sanqu, the classical Chinese fixed-rhythm lyric form, giving Wu Li's instinct for cross-cultural dialogue a new and living voice.
The installation is presented as a triptych — three synchronised screens that quietly echo Wu Li's religious inheritance while turning the exhibition space itself into part of the composition. The screens don't simply play in parallel; they build a layered field in which history feels inhabited rather than displayed, and the question of what it means to carry a culture across time, across water, across faith, stays open long after you leave the room.
Wu Li never made it to Rome. But something of him is here now, in Venice — carried not as artifact or footnote but as a living question about what it means to exist between worlds, to absorb without erasing, to travel without arriving.
Jacone's Polyphony doesn't resolve that question. It holds it. Through Fok's cartographies of imagined routes, Lei's wax-softened architecture, and Chi Wai's layered field of walking and listening, the exhibition makes space for what history tends to abbreviate — the interior life of a man for whom painting, poetry, faith, and cultural collision were never separate things. They were the same practice, running on the same breath.
Macao and Venice have more in common than geography invites you to notice: two small, water-bound cities that became, for a time, the places where different worlds had to learn to speak to each other. That conversation was never clean or finished. It still isn't. What these three artists propose — quietly, through their materials and methods — is that the work of translation is not a historical event but an ongoing one, and that art remains one of the few places where the untaken journey can still arrive somewhere.
