For 10 months during 2006-2007, while on a William J. Fulbright grant, I photographed the former Portuguese colony of Macau (now a Special Administrative Region of China) and witnessed a key moment in its transformation from a small enclave into a gambling Mecca.  

My first few nights in Macau were filled with fitful sleep and strangely vivid dreams produced by a combination of jet-lag and sleeping pills.  Soon these visions were replaced with the equally strange reality of a very small place with very big expectations.  I came here with the tentative objective of looking at the historical architecture of the region: A unique confluence of Portuguese colonialism and Chinese vernacular with a bit of casino-kitsch thrown in.  But these expectations were soon outgrown as well, as I saw a region in the midst of complete transformation. 

Soon after the handover from Portuguese control to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, the casino industry which, until then was monopolized by Hong Kong businessman Stanley Ho, was opened to foreign investment.  Since then, Macau has been busily trying to place itself as the gaming and leisure destination for, not just China, but all of Asia.  As of 2007 Macau had usurped the Las Vegas Strip as the most valuable piece of gambling real estate in the world.[1]  This was with the majority of the hotel rooms and gaming floors yet to be opened (or even built) on the CoTai Strip.[2]

Walking down the street is like moving through the illogical progression of a dream. The challenge then becomes, not to find examples of x and photograph them, but to be lost in the multitude of meanings and remain there.  Beyond presenting Macau as a site of physical, cultural and political change, these pictures attempt to navigate a territory of conflicting perceptions inherent in the movement from historical city to phantasmagorical dreamscape.  In doing so, they present Macau as existing somewhere between a reflection of an internal architecture and that of a physical reality.

[1] “Macao Surpasses Las Vegas as Gambling Center”, New York Times, January 23rd, 2007

[2] The “CoTai Strip” is a piece of reclaimed land between the two former islands of Coloane and Taipa.  There are an estimated (Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels, research digest) 37,000 hotel rooms under construction or planned for construction after 2007, tripling the pre-2007 number. Also on CoTai will be the largest gaming floor in the world at the Venetian Macao casino project.