"City Skin" is an abstract concept as well as a concrete reality. The process of modern urbanization and its associated flood of images have already become both a defining feature and an inevitable trend in modern cities. This exhibition uses the discourse of contemporary art and the methods of feasibility studies to explore the concept, and redefinition, of the modern city, and to investigate the role played by the concept of the "image" in the functioning of the city.

The exhibition entitled "City Skin - Images of the Contemporary Metropolis" is co-organized by the Macao Tap Seac Gallery and the Shenzhen Museum of Art, and takes as its topic experimental research in contemporary art. The call for works received an enthusiastic response among artists from mainland China as well as Macao, and the exhibition itself will take place in both Macao and Shenzhen, a fact that will certainly have a positive impact upon the increasing dialogue about contemporary art and culture between Macao and the mainland.

In the pieces on display, artists from mainland China and Macao express different experiences, interpretations, and explorations of the city and its images. These different sentiments and investigations in turn reveal the extent to which the problems and conditions of contemporary life are of widespread concern among today's artists. It also demonstrates the depth of their analysis and thinking about images and the contemporary urban situation.

In exhibiting these pieces, we have tried to expand the traditional sense of the exhibition hall to include other public spaces in the city, such as historical buildings, streets, back alleys and hidden passageways, and World Heritage sites. We have also tried to mount the exhibition through the use of technologies such as electronic screens, billboards, outdoor installations, and traditional and modern media (newspapers, television, cell phones). At the same time, as the Internet is quickly becoming a new medium for the functioning of the city, it also appears in this exhibition as a strategy for displaying artists' works.

We hope that this exhibition and the research that has gone into it may motivate viewers to take a new look at their own everyday environment, and to take new inspiration from it as well.