Macau’s Poly MGM Museum draws huge crowds with hi-tech Maritime Silk Road exhibition
Fusing ancient artefacts with cutting-edge technology, Macau’s new Poly MGM Museum is drawing huge crowds eager for an immersive historical experience
Poly Culture Group Corporation partnered with casino operator MGM to open the 2,000-square-metre Poly MGM Museum last November, with a launch exhibition on the Maritime Silk Road featuring some 230 artefacts from 20 international museums and galleries. Until late last month, the display included four of the famed bronze zodiac heads from Beijing’s Old Summer Palace.
It’s a culture-forward move by both parties, Poly Culture Group being the art and antiques unit of a vast Chinese state-run corporation with business interests in everything from resources to real estate, while MGM is one of six gaming concessionaires in the SAR.
It would be gauche to suggest that MGM’s motives are anything less than altruistic when it comes to this lavish project, but it has to be pointed out that, over the course of their current 10-year licence period, Macau’s casino operators are required to collectively spend MOP108.7 billion (HK$105.53 billion) on “non-gaming projects”. That could mean building a new arena, for example, or opening a health facility – or developing a state-of-the-art museum, which the Poly MGM facility certainly is.
Just as we now cannot look at a text without clicking on embedded videos or scrolling quickly to the good bits, so must objects in a museum case be given a digital glow-up if they are to hold our stunted attention spans. The Poly MGM Museum does this through “proprietary OLED screens for interactive displays and directional audio systems”, and claims to offer visitors “a multisensory immersive experience”.
The combination of Old World treasures and up-to-date tech has proved popular: more than half a million people have filed through the doors since the museum opened less than five months ago. An excited resident of Foshan, surnamed Chen, who last month was declared the 500,000th visitor, said his family had come to Macau to see the zodiac heads, adding, “The hi-tech applications in the museum, especially the OLED interactive display cases, greatly helped us understand the stories behind each exhibit.”