Macau is both the homeland and the subject of so many photographers, but rarely has its soul been so profoundly and totally revealed as it has been through Ho Sang Wong's impression and photographs.
We are referring to his exhibition "Interiors" - a collection of about twenty photographs depicting professional figures and types of Macau.
If it is true that it is "inside things that things exist" there is no better way to portray Macau - its complexity as a meeting place for so many crazy people and things - than to discover and record its innermost recesses, shades and luminosity.
No-one would be better placed and prepared than Ho Sang Wong to execute this x-ray of lights and shadows.
He was born and bred in Macau, has a sharp and inquisitive eye and is the repository of many years' experience in the art of photography, having learnt photography, design, painting and drawing in Macau, and then graduated in Fine Arts (Photography) from the California Art Center College, where he now teaches.
In Ho Sang's "Interiors" the clichés of Macau's daily, ancestral and anthropological imaginary world are concentrated with a documentary density which is served by the harmony and suggestiveness of the composition.
As a frame and a setting for the figures, the background is made denser with cuttings from newspapers, almanacs, centuries-old excerpts from the Portuguese press, fragments of ancient Chinese furniture, a Ming chair or an old clock, bits of typically Macanese architecture, windows and objects of daily use, Chinese engravings and old paintings, historical characters and glimpses of interiors with their paraphernalia of the more typical ornaments.
Employing a succession of silver gelatine printing techniques, making use of the Sabatier effect and of reversed developments, Ho Sang, in a masterly way, obtains a warm environment of black, sienna, sepia and pale greys, all perfectly harmonised and controlled. Thus he gives us a series of interiors where semi-darkness is penetrated by sudden, calculated doses of light, in a chiaroscuro of magic intimism, with the suggestion that souls and spirits are omnipresent in places and things.
In this beautiful synthesis of differences and of the mingling of worlds, peoples, imaginary realms, glowing with life and loving complacency, throbs the new-old soul of Macau.
Series Interior - Interpreter.
Series Interior - Hotel Professional.
Series Interior - Chinese Operatic Artist.
Series Interior - Knife-Grinder.
Series Interior - Father Manuel Teixeira.
Series Interior - Indian Trader.
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