Origin of Research
visual research \ 11.2025 \ macau
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5th International Workshop on Visual Research for PhD Students and Young Researchers
Research Theme: A hyperlocal visual mapping of ambiences and materialities to invite playful reinvention of Macau identities and cultural constructs.
Fieldwork:
Site - Mercado da Horta da Mitra, Macau
where small businesses of old and new sit next to each other,
while artisans and designers cross paths;
where traditions are practiced daily,
and urban renewal powdered up marks of local lives.
Proposition - How to create a set of Macau-suited playing cards or a Macau-themed Trading Card Game (TCG) using a hybrid of digital and analogue visual formats while experimenting with tactile rendering tools.
Vignettes subsequently developed after the Workshop:
Macau_Days - a colour ethnography
Macau_Nights - a colour ethnography 2.0
transdisciplinary research \ since 05.2025
Wall of ideas and memories from a two-day workshop of story-telling and book-making by children
August 2024, Macau
\\ Grannie Orchid and Her Handover Paper Fan \\
EVERY MORNING people faithfully go to Jardim da Flora for morning exercises. Grannie Orchid is one of them. On this day, a small group of children engaged her in conversation when she was resting in the garden pavilion.
“This is my Handover Fan I used for morning dance practice,” Grannie Orchid demonstrated by expertly opening and closing her giant red paper fan. “Children, do you know what the Handover is?”
A. , aged nine, volunteered, “Handover is a flower.” He did not know if there’s another name for the flower, just that it’s called Handover Flower.
The rest of the group was puzzled, so A. assured them that they would probably see this flower if they walked further up the Jardim.
The group reached a pond at the top of the Jardim estrada. A. pointed out, “There they are, the Handover flowers!”
They saw a lotus pond.
19 August 2024, Jardim da Flora, Macau
"Tales from Macau" was a summer programme conducted in August 2024, where children are taken on field trips to observe and collect artefacts from heritage localities. They later attended workshops on storytelling and book-making, eventually each making their own picture books which were later publicly exhibited.
Documentation website: https://houseofchildhood.wixsite.com/tales-from-macau
Context:
This episode about a beautiful misunderstanding between generations left me wondering at the transformative power of children to bring poetry and imagination to existing narratives and human constructs.
Questions:
What if children were given the capabilities to create their own stories about their own hometown, instead of being passive listeners to others' stories? What would they be?
What kind of insights will it give about reverse-engineering our identities and socio-cultural constructs from the works of children?
MYTHOLOGIES FROM THE FUTURE -
Our Next Generation Re-Authoring Histories
A cross-cultural and transdisciplinary study on how the younger generation in Macau and Portugal (specifically the Açores) may re-imagine the given narratives of their hometown and reinvent their identities, in the process making new myths for these communities of diaspora and re-authoring the existing future. Through participatory action research conducted on the younger generation creating their hyper-local stories and games which transcend generations and cultural bearings, research paradigms in identities/narratives may be augmented with non-linear temporal and aperspectival inputs. Visual research tools will be deployed to facilitate simultaneity and translingual mapping.
In progress:
In preparing for the research proposal for PhD candidacy, I conducted a review based on a remote focus group of families from diverse backgrounds with young children in Macau. Taking into account the mostly young research subjects, an online card game has been designed to engage them better and to enable more open-ended responses. The game, termed "Macau Hunt" with instructions for host parents is at this web link https://houseofchildhood.wixsite.com/macauhunt.
Responses have been received from children and parent participants in Macau with Chinese, Macanese and Portuguese roots. Notably most of the children participants played the game their way by choosing more than one card as their answers and suggesting to include new images for the card game. While this initial exercise is not part of the research, it offers hopeful insights into how children may reauthor the given. Responses received also inspired a spin-off research project for children to create their own card/board games about Macau. I have given it the name "Macau Game Changers (MGC)".
Next:
I hope that, with the perfect timing of the Fifth International Workshop on Visual Research held in November 2025, I may trial run MGC myself, instead of and ahead of the young participants. This will help me in finetuning the design for MGC, and allow me to facilitate with greater sensitivity and empathy for the actual young participants. It will also enable me to observe the subtle variations of visual research tools as may be deployed by an adult and by a younger person. For the fieldwork, I hope to conduct in Mercado da Horta da Mitra of Macau. This will mark the beginning of my research collaboration with the Research Laboratory for Cultural Sustainability of the University of Saint Joseph, Macau.
Vignettes subsequently developed after the Workshop:
Macau_Days - a colour ethnography
Macau_Nights - a colour ethnography 2.0