High Life

HIGH LIFE #13 Oct 2017 29 M acau’s modern art scene originated with the establishment of Macau Visual Arts Academy at St Agostinho, the first art school opened by the local government. Mio Pang Fei, the first Vice Director of the academy, was teaching western painting, encouraging students to experiment and actively introducing art forms to stimulate student thinking. His courses inspired and nurtured many local talents who are now mainstays of the Macau art scene. Mio, who moved to Macau at the age of 47, was 54 when the academy launched. Born in Shanghai in the 1930s, Mio Pang Fei witnessed majorsocial, political andcultural developments in20thcentury China. Early in his career, while still studying at art school, he became interested in contemporary western art, moving away from social realismwhichwas deemed to be orthodox. “Myarthistoryclass stoppedatGustaveCourbet–the 100 years thereafter was a blank,” Mio recalls. “But I was curious what happened and went to the library to find relevant books by myself. That’s when I learned about Impressionism, Post- Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism, which were forbidden to talk about at that time. I was attracted to them and started to move away from Realism to research the latter in secret. “Though I was studying Realism, to see those new forms was very attractive to me and introduced me to a new world, so I began to try and think about the world from their point of view. But it was very difficult to get the information I needed.” Being a Chinese painter towards the end of the 20th century, Mio experienced the maze of an unstable era. In the 1960s, while in his thirties, he had begun seeking his own way in the field of art even though it was a difficult period to gather information about modern art.