Hong Kong and Macau Museum dioramas

I just came back from a short holiday to HK and Macau. I visited a couple of museums, one in HK and the other in Macau. The HK museum has a very interesting temporary exhibition of artefacts loaned from the Russian Summer Palace in St Petersburg. Really impressive works of art. Past exhibitions from this museum really looked interesting. There was a substantial bookshop too but the books were just too hefty to cart back.

http://hk.history.museum/en_US/web/mh/exhibition/current.html


Then there is the Macau museum. This was located within the old Portuguese fortress on top of a hill and it was very well-done. Besides various ongoing exhibitions which include recent archaeological digs from the Bronze age onwards, there were some nice dioramas for which photography was allowed. These were a mixture of tabletop and shadowbox dioramas. All showed scenes taken from Macau's past. I will show each in chronological order.

The first diorama shows Macau around the Bronze age. Nicely painted background but the background was not curved upwards from the horizon. Similarly the top of the background was flat. Thus the perspective was marred by these perpendicular edges. 

The scene was also generic, not much going on except sitting around breaking stones? I think that more could be done to improve the transition from foreground to midground.

This diorama was more interesting, showing the development of a fishing community. The background painting and the buildings were very well made. the sea was resin poured over the base, quite nicely done.

This  showed the Portuguese making their first foray into Macau. The Chinese officials wore Ming costumes so the period appeared about right. The scene was marred by rather awkward perspectives. It was not helped by the perpendicular horizon edge either. The fully 3-dimensional ships looked rather distorted in the background.
I think that those figures should have been doing something and interacting, rather than stand around and stare at each other.