Digital Media Blog 01/20/2020

Digital Media Blog
01/20/2020
Current issues #10
Preserving Macao's handmade signs in the digital age

According to CNN, Lam Weng Io is a scholar or a librarian, bespectacled and in deep concentration. perched on a stool in his dusty workshop in Macao,

With steady hands, he carefully guides a sheet of red acrylic through a cutting machine.
For more than 30 years, Lam has been creating handwritten storefront signs in the former Portuguese colony as a full-time typographer. In each of his characters, Lam aims for a trifecta of balance, clarity, and liveliness.
Hundreds of the 65-year-old's signs can be seen all over Macao, a special administrative region that was handed back to China in 1999 after centuries of Portuguese rule.
They're written in traditional Chinese characters -- which are more complicated and contain more strokes -- as opposed to the simplified Chinese characters that were adopted by the mainland in the 1950s, when Macao was still a European colony. 
Adorning the entrance to Lam's workshop-cum-abode are bright red letters, wishing good fortune in the Year of the Pig. As he works, wall of white paper scrolls covered with Chinese poems and aphorisms flutter in the breeze.
The machine hums and slices. Lam shifts the sheet this way and that.
After a few minutes of intense focus, Lam frees a word from an acrylic sheet. He holds it up to light, inspects the grooves.
While this particularly character is usually written as two nonadjacent radicals that look like saloon doors from a Western movie, Lam's 門 comes out in one piece, with the stylized flourishes of a brushstroke.
Lam says he was noticed for his penmanship from an early age.

"I've always been interested in Chinese characters," Lam says. "When I was a student, other classmates would ask me to write characters for them, because they liked the look of my handwriting. When I got older, people told me that I should open my own business."








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