‘INKED FOOD’: TASTING MACAO THROUGH A CHENG’S WATER PAINTED CARICATURE透過亞正的水墨漫畫品味澳門

Starting from the premise that the "act of presenting food" is equivalent to presenting culture, this article proposes to read Macao through a specific visual mediation: A-Cheng's ink-and-wash caricatures. Rather than privileging gustatory perception, the images activate a reception based on sight a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Review of Culture
Main Author: Elisabetta Colla
Format: Articles
Published: Instituto Cultural de Macau 2013
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Online Access:https://www.icm.gov.mo/rc/viewer/pdfViewerParts/40043/2737
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Summary:Starting from the premise that the "act of presenting food" is equivalent to presenting culture, this article proposes to read Macao through a specific visual mediation: A-Cheng's ink-and-wash caricatures. Rather than privileging gustatory perception, the images activate a reception based on sight and reconducted memory. The author argues that, although A-Cheng is primarily known as a cartoonist, his paintings retain an archival sensibility and a "point of memory," fixing on paper everyday scenes and affective collections associated with a Macao in transformation. Methodologically, the text articulates iconographic analysis and theoretical discussion on cultural memory (between "lieux de mémoire" and "post-memory"), relating pictorial technique (ink and wash with double lines, colors, and caricatural disproportions) to processes of Sino-Portuguese hybridization. It concludes that food—treated as a motif and not merely as a theme—functions as an intersection between past and present, individual and collective, allowing one to "taste" Macao through visual language. Thus, "Macanese cuisine," understood as a fragment of broader historical dynamics, reveals itself as an interpretive key for understanding the persistence of tradition and the burlesque dramatization of everyday life.
ISSN:1682-1106