Weng Io Wong's solo exhibition All Memories Will Be Good In the End is on view at Ox Warehouse.
Artist Statement:
Through revisiting my childhood, the exhibition “All the Memories will be Good in the End” recounts the influence growing up in Macau has on me, also attempting to chronicle the living condition and status of the Macau people. My parents both worked in the casinos, and, as I recall, they often communicated in a set of peculiar jargons—specific terms they used in their workplace—which informed the basis of my nascent understanding of language.
The tapestry works included in the exhibition, borrowed their compositions from my family album, in which I converted the palettes of the photographs into the color scheme of the carpets found in various Macau’s casinos. Dave Schwartz, Director of the Center in Gaming Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, once theorizes that “casino carpet is known as an exercise in deliberate bad taste that somehow encourages people to gamble.” The carpet, which is employed multifunctionally as decoration, psychological application, and so forth, constructed a particular psychedelic pattern and form—a form that at the same time, conjures up in me an image of current Macau: enveloped by a deceptive, gimcrack exterior, come across vague but at times vibrant, spectacular but often neglected… The “shearing” process in carpet manufacturing trims the excessive yarn into an even length, and thus renders the carpet’s surface smooth. The word “shear” holds another layer of definition in the Cambridge Dictionary: “to cut the hair on a person’s head close to the skin, especially without care.” The former definition reminds one of the rapid social development that happened right after the gaming liberalization in Macau, which drastically narrowed down the local job market in favor of the gaming industry. By 2020, employees in the gaming industry significantly outnumber those who work in the other industries, taking up 20.8% of the total workforce in Macau—which consists of 85,800 people. How does this impact the younger generation? Another definition of “shear” also forces me to reconsider the drawbacks of typical Chinese parenting, as the act of “cutting someone’s hair without care” doubles down as a metaphor that points to how such mode of education only instills obedience in children, instead of nurturing their individuality…
Text and image courtesy of the artist and Ox Warehouse.
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