Macau Days

ISBN 978-0-9953925-2-6 
187 pages | Hardcover | B&W and colour images 
277mm H x 220mm W 
September 2017 

Artist: John Young 
Poet: Brian Castro 
Additional texts: Edward Colless and Paul Carter 

This tri-lingual book (English, Portuguese, Chinese) includes a series of poetic texts by Brian Castro and artworks by John Young, which both engage their shared histories of Macau. It also offers an introductory letter by Edward Colless and a response from Paul Carter. Castro’s text, titled Macau Days: Or Six Characters in Search of a Dish, is structured like a meal and traditional Macanese recipes accompany his texts. Young’s artworks—paintings, chalk drawings and montages as well as stunning photographs of the Macanese dishes—are dispersed throughout the texts. 

Macau, as a place, has gone through fundamental metamorphosis over the course of half a millennium. Beginning as a merchant port of refuge and fisherman’s haven, to a gateway for the Jesuit missionaries, and as the nineteenth an twentieth century Modernism of a Portuguese province; where poets and artists from the west and China traversed, and transformed their own orientation in becoming transcultural individuals. Now Macau is defined as a phantasmagoric site for gambling, housing more than 38 casinos, rivalling Las Vegas. These changes have been brought metaphorically into the conditions of the cultural world today.