Beyond the Gaze – 2025.03.07 |

The Rui Cunha Foundation and the Photobook Club Macau will host today, Friday, March 7th at 6:30pm, the presentation of the book “Beyond the Gaze”, a posthumous work by photographer Frank Lei who was a reference in the practice and teaching of Photography in Macau, at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries.

The presentation will be led by Francisco Ricarte, one of the founders of Halftone Association and promoter of the Photobook Club Macau, with the presence of Jane Lei, sister of the acclaimed Frank Lei, and Alan Ieong, editor of the book. This conversation between friends aims to evoke the author’s work and highlight his visual sensitivity for photographic composition, going through the images that marked his time and bore witness to this place.

“Beyond the Gaze” summarizes Frank Lei’s vision of Macau, a city he cherished so much. «Frank Lei lived in a time of great social, economic, and urban changesin Macau, carried out not only by means of an expansion process – extensive land reclamations – but also through the demolition of existing informal urban settlements, or old buildings, that used to shape the traditional city and its way of living. He was able to portray these transformations with a deep sense of belonging, humanity, however, also of loss», says architect and photographer Francisco Ricarte.

Nevertheless, Frank Lei’s photography went far beyond a documental registrationof the physical changes of a place. «Frank’s visual sensibility of composition, scale and balance of light and shadow (sometimes conveying deep dramatic shadows) to picture Macau as a land of perpetual change and new times to come, allow us to further understand this city and its human identity. In Frank’s photography, space is always conveyed through a human scale which enhances its significance and role», he adds.

Frank Lei was born in Beijing in 1962, but came to live in Macau at a young age. After completing his academic studies in Cinema and Video at the University of Paris III, and in Photography at ENSAD in Paris, he returned to Macau where he settled. His professional activity led him to the “Macau Daily News”, he then became the curator of Albergue and afterwards of the Ox Warehouse, he published several photography books, held solo exhibitions in Macau and France, and won important photography awards. Frank Lei died in 2022, after a prolonged period of illness.