Macau is participating for the first time in the Curitiba Contemporary Art Biennial, one of the largest contemporary art events in Latin America, bringing works to Brazil that pay homage to the late Portuguese artist Helena Almeida, the pavilion’s curator announced today.
Margarida Saraiva, a Portuguese researcher and curator at the Macau Museum of Art (MAM), expressed hope that this debut in Curitiba will establish a precedent for future collaborations and open sustainable channels for cultural exchange between Macau, Brazil, and Latin America.
The Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC) of the Chinese Special Administrative Region has set up a dedicated pavilion within the biennial’s main venue, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum—a space named after the celebrated Brazilian architect who passed away in 2012.
The 16th edition of the biennial marks a highly anticipated return to a physical, in-person format after its previous iteration in 2021 was forced online due to the pandemic. The event kicked off on June 14 and will run until November 15 in Curitiba, the capital of the southern Brazilian state of Paraná.
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The Macau Pavilion features three digital works commissioned by the IC for the first-ever retrospective of Helena Almeida (1934–2018) in Asia, which showcased 190 pieces by the prominent Portuguese artist at the MAM between January and April.
The first installation, titled “Five Língu-Língu” by Macau artist Bianca Lei Sio Chong, weaves together five languages: Cantonese, Mandarin, English, Portuguese, and Patuá, a critically endangered Portuguese-based Creole unique to Macau. In an era where artificial intelligence normalizes instantaneous universal translation, Saraiva emphasized that Lei’s work actively resists linguistic homogenization.
Another featured piece, “Fragments of Time – Theatre of the Face” by Chinese artist Gao Fuyan, captures, projects, prints, and systematically shreds the viewer’s face. The interactive piece questions the residual nature of human identity in an era dominated by widespread facial recognition technologies.
The third work, “WU . Stone . Sardapass” by Peng Yun, dives deep into the threshold separating humans and machines. It features the Macau-based Chinese artist working under the continuous, mechanical gaze of a robotic dog.
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Saraiva highlighted that Macau’s presence at the Curitiba Biennial is integrated into the official calendar of the Brazil-China Cultural Year 2026, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Brasilia and Beijing.
The exhibition directly reflects a policy of strengthening ties with Portuguese-speaking nations, reaffirming Macau’s unique position as a cultural bridge connecting the Chinese and Lusophone worlds. The curator described the showcase as a milestone in cultural diplomacy, marking the first time Macau has engineered an independent pavilion for a major Latin American art exhibition.
Established in 1993, the Curitiba Biennial features more than 300 artists from 38 countries and territories this year. Spanning an exhibition footprint of 35,000 square meters, the event routinely attracts over one million visitors per edition. Saraiva noted that international audiences will discover a side of Macau that is not merely a global tourism hub, but a site of profound contemporary reflection.
