I was privileged to get selected for this year’s The Arctic Circle Residency Programme, where I got the opportunity to engage in art production with 28 artists coming from all around the world on a two-week cruise on the Arctic ocean that is ten latitudes away from the north pole.  

The Arctic Circle Residency Programme is open to artists all around the world, aiming to encourage cross-cultural communication and crossover collaboration while turning the Arctic into a fertile ground that incubates creativity, diversity and innovation. To date, the programme has been held for eleven years, striving to raise the public’s awareness of environmental challenges. As the only Asian artist on in the residency programme this year, besides writing my pieces on ecology and collecting materials for art projects, I also took the chance to talk to painters, musicians and artists from other fields about Macao’s environmental protection, maritime history and the city’s art and literature, especially the increasingly devastating natural disasters and pollution caused by land reclamation.

The ocean has always been the centre of Macao’s history. Whether it is during the Age of Discovery, the Silk Road, or today’s craze for land reclamation, the ocean has played a central role in them as it used to be a bridge connecting the West and the East on the ocean. I started to think about the meaning of the ocean several years ago when I was writing a suite poem for Macao City Fringe’s Art for Sea project. Two years ago, the devastating Typhoon Hato hit Macao, causing a massive blackout in the city and cutting off our water supply. In the dark, I wrote The Savage Convenience Store, which then won the first prize of Macao Literature Awards’ modern poetry category. Lots of questions always wander in my mind: what special meaning that the ocean holds for today’s Macao? What is the relationship between mankind and the ocean? Are we just simply exploiting the resources that the ocean provides?

Many artists of the Arctic Circle Residency Programme would make use of the materials they found during the programme, including some stones with unique features, ice scraps and fishing nets. Some artists focused on filming documentaries regarding the white whales or performance art involving themes like refugee, residency, civilisation, conquer, dominance and domestication, etc. These art projects might appear to be different from each other, but they share a common ground: we were all trying not to produce any waste when making art.

As a matter of fact, another important objective of The Arctic Circle Residency Programme is to collect garbage.

The Arctic is as beautiful as the paradise, but it is not as clean as before. Scientists had previously found high concentration of plastic particles in a snow sample from Svalbard. In reality, you can find all kinds of garbage in the Arctic (items before 1946 are considered as artefacts). Some of the common garbage you can find in the Arctic include fishing nets, plastic, ropes, floating balls and lead balls. Sometimes you might even see buckets and toothbrushes. Around the scattered garbage in the Arctic, there are footprints of local inhabitants like reindeers, arctic foxes and polar bears. After the whole trip, we collected around 3,000 litres of garbage. It took our trailer three round-trips to bring all the garbage to the refuse collection point in Longyearbyen. 

This example depicts that The Arctic Circle Residency Programme is not purely a platform where artists can extract inspiration from the Arctic, but a mutual portal that allows the artists to interact with the environment in the Arctic.

Some would question the actual agenda of The Arctic Circle Residency Programme, believing that it is only a programme that provides a different life experience. The comment makes sense. When famous Chinese writer Eileen Chang was staying at the MacDowell Colony, she only stayed at a quiet cabin in the woods and wrote books. Cloud Gate’s Wanderer Project was established with the simple hope of encouraging young artists to travel around the world. Utilitarianists are probably dissatisfied with the fact that the artists participating in The Arctic Circle Residency Programme didn’t create valuable and significant artworks during the programme. But the experience and exposure to the Arctic can have a huge impact on the artists.

There are lots of art residency programmes in the world, probably more than 2,000. The aims of these programmes also vary from one another. Some artists join these programmes for opportunities, inspiration, resource or expanding their social network to keep up with the latest trends in the industry and learn new techniques. Some programmes aim to provide a platform for creative artists to come together and discuss on certain agenda and brainstorm for ideas and develop feasible plans. There are also programmes that place emphasis on contributing back to communities and connecting communities, bringing artists and writers to schools to conduct sharing sessions. Would you believe me if I tell you that every time I join a residency programme I would be able to get exposure to translators and independent publishers that share similar interests, musicians and artists that bring about crossover collaboration opportunities, reading lists and works that really open my eyes, anecdotes that could be adapted into a actual fiction, cultural clashes that spark thinking, or raise more people’s interest in Macao’s art and literature?
   
You don’t believe me? It is quite normal. It is similar to a scene in Plato’s book The Republic, in which the men trapped in a cave would not believe any of the words from people coming from the outside, believing that the cave is the whole world and that there is no such thing as the sun.