Writing on the Streets

It was late on a chilly March afternoon as I wandered through a small plaza near Houhai Lake in Beijing. The air was struggling to stay above freezing and I shivered in my spring jacket. Looking down, I noticed some Chinese characters drawn in water on the plaza’s grey paving stones. Whoever drew them was long gone; the cool air had kept them from evaporating.

I’d heard about water calligraphy before, but this was the first time I had seen it for myself. It’s a form of art that draws beauty from the ephemeral: like spoken words, these characters vanish into the air, their meaning lost to time and memory. It also says something about the futility of control. No matter how much you master your technique, no matter how well you squeeze these words into the form you want them to take, you are left with the same empty patch of stone you started with.

I’ve never heard of anyone doing water calligraphy in Hong Kong. For some reason, people here are much more inhibited in the way they use public space. Go to an open space in any given Chinese city and you’ll see a far greater range of activities than in a comparable place in Hong Kong. Go to Shenzhen’s Civic Square on a nice Sunday afternoon, for instance, and you’ll find people driving electric race cars, playing instruments, flying kites, riding bikes, doing water calligraphy, singing and dancing. There’s irony in the fact that people behave far more exuberantly in an authoritarian state than in an ostensibly free city.

That said, I did come across something in Hong Kong that reminded me of water calligraphy. In Man Ming Lane, just behind Exit C of the Yau Ma Tei MTR station, someone used white chalk to write a lengthy screed on the redbrick sidewalk. I saw it late one night and, since I live only 15 minutes away by foot, I returned the next day to photograph it. But most of the chalk had already been worn off and it was impossible to read most of what had been written.

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Need a Plumber?

In Hong Kong, like in many Asian cities, it’s common for contractors to advertise their services through graffiti. Forget Google — to find an electrician, a plumber or a cement specialist, just walk down the street and look at the phone numbers scrawled on utility boxes with magic marker or stencilled on walls with spray paint.

One plumber rises above the rest. Throughout Hong Kong, often in very unexpected places, you will encounter the same telephone number and neatly-written inscription: Tong Kui Jo Hau — “Unclogs drains, repairs pipes” — followed by a signature, Kui Wong, that translates roughly as “The King of Plumbing.”

Who is this king plumber who paints on walls with such care and patience? Does he carry a can of paint when he gets called out for a job, just in case he stumbles across a particularly enticing wall? I’m not sure I want to find out — it would spoil the romance of drainage royalty decorating the city under cover of night.

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Mexican Bohemia: Chicago’s Pilsen

From the Loop, the Pink Line El bursts west, floating among the rooftops of a low-rise industrial district. As the city’s wall of downtown skyscrapers drifts away and the train enters an expanse of limitless sky, it’s as if the Pink Line is darting toward far more distant destinations than its terminus in neighboring Cicero. The slightly undulating horizontals of the warehouse roofs take on the characteristics of the rolling, arid Plains and desert beyond, stretching almost ceaselessly to the south and the west.

Stopping at 18th St., though, it’s more apparent the journey transports mentally further than it has physically; the Sears Tower still looms totemically, as it does over most of pancake-flat Chicago’s south and west sides. But something else has happened: the station is covered in a riot of color; art infuses every step and crevice. Alighting here, the rider descends this urban canvas into Pilsen: first settled by crafty vrais Bohemians, resettled by Mexicans and increasingly claimed again by bohemians of a different sort, Pilsen is a neighborhood where artistic traditions run deep.

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Hong Kong Rooftops: Russell Street

The tong lau on Russell Street, across from Times Square, is not in the best shape. Walking upstairs from the street, I pass a bookstore and a hair salon; after the third floor, the shops give way to apartments and the stairwell becomes filled with rubbish, its tiles stained by years of grime. By the time I reach the top, I have to step over piles of construction debris just to get outside.

But I’m here precisely because this building has been overlooked: its roof is now covered in graffiti. Compared to many other cities around the world, graffiti and street art are still fairly uncommon in Hong Kong, and rooftops like this give artists a kind of sketch pad on which to practice away from the eyes of the public. There are lots of tags, but also some work by the city’s best-known street artists, Graphic Airlines — whose chubby-faced characters are now as common in galleries as they are on the street — and Start from Zero, whose preferred media include stickers and wheatpaste.

There’s more up here than just graffiti. From here, I can peer behind the giant billboards that face Times Square; I’m surprised to see they are propped up by bamboo scaffolding. I would have expected something more elaborate and permanent, but perhaps bamboo allows the billboard to be easily dismantled in case the market for luxury watches and designer handbags collapses. It seems a fitting irony: the city’s corporate advertising is supported by traditional craftsmanship, its presence as fleeting and ephemeral as graffiti that is painted over or worn away by the sun.

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Graffiti Alley

Street art in Hong Kong tends to be limited to specific areas and the scene is dominated by a handful of very prolific artists, like Start from Zero and Graphic Airlines, who work mainly with posters, stencil art and stickers. In a few corners of town, though, it’s possible to find clusters of exuberantly traditional graffiti. One of these can be found along a laneway next to Mong Kok East Station on the former KCR (now East Rail) line. There’s a couple of Graphic Airlines paste-ups but mostly it’s stuff I don’t recognize, which is refreshing.

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Patching the City With Lego

Children and adults alike have long built fantasy cities out of Lego. But Jan Vormann seems like he’s on a mission to patch all the holes, cracks, and fissures in the walls of the world’s existing cities with the colorful toy bricks. As part of his Dispatchwork project, the German artist has already stuffed Lego pieces into holes on four continents, from Tel Aviv to Quito to New York — where he vowed to “support Mayor Bloomberg in his everyday struggle” by assembling a thirty person crew to patch a post office, the wall surrounding Central Park, Times Square’s police station, and, of course, the mosaic walls of the subway. In Berlin, passersby pitched in to help plug bullet holes left from the Second World War.

Vormann’s project has not been without incident. He dryly reports that Serbians were “not too into plastic,” muttering something “connected to the term ‘private property’”. In Quito, he inadvertently found himself patching the city’s “most dangerous” street. But his most difficult installation may have been Zürich, where the artist said it was “hard to find spots” because “the municipality is too wealthy to let the facades show decay”.

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The Future of Canadian Cities

In 2008, Carmine Starnino, poet and now editor of Maisonneuve magazine, asked me to write an essay on the future of Canadian cities for an issue of Canadian Notes and Queries he was guest-editing. Here’s what I came up with.

Some days, on the corner of Clark and de la Gauchetière in Montreal, you’ll find a fortune teller who can read your fate in English, French, Mandarin and Cantonese. It’s a very non-specific kind of fate, which is usually the case with fortune tellers, but I sometimes wonder what he would have to say about larger subjects—like the city that surrounds him, for instance. What will it, and others like it across the country, look like in a generation? I’m no fortune teller, but here are three trends I think might influence the shape of our cities in the near future.

1. Edible cities

I never thought much about my family’s backyard when growing up in Calgary. Wide and shallow, its grassy expanse was eventually surrendered to our two dogs, who used it as their toilet. We were far from exceptional, and what still strikes me when I drive through Canadian suburbs is the sheer amount of empty grass. It’s always seemed like an egregious waste of space.

But things are starting to change. Small efforts are being made to introduce small-scale agriculture and locally-grown food into Canadian cities. Green roofs and backyard gardens have emerged in Vancouver; food co-ops in Toronto. In Montreal, the Minimum-Cost Housing Group has been busy finding ways to marry food production with urban life.

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Moving on from Fort Point

The bridge where Summer Street crosses over A is literally the bowels of Fort Point, the shadowy bottom of a neighborhood where buildings reach different heights depending where they meet the grade of the street. In October, the underside of the bridge was covered in rainbow-colored, neon slinkys. Closer to the holiday season, it was bedecked in the brilliant illumination of hundreds of blue lights.

A block away, prints by Shepard Fairey — infamously arrested last year for promoting his show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, just a stone’s throw from Fort Point, with a guerilla street art installation — cover an abandoned diner, and ghostly photo portraits intermittently stare from walls.

This prevalence of open-air art — not even counting what’s in the neighborhood’s galleries and studio spaces — give one the impression that Fort Point’s art scene is thriving. But stroll just a few feet from the Summer Street bridge and a pair of homemade, laser-printed posters bearing the logo of the Fort Point Artist Community proclaim it an “endangered neighborhood”.

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Hong Kong Street Art Goes Political

In a winter marked by rallies and protests, young people unhappy with Hong Kong’s government are taking to the streets in more ways than one. Over the past year, Hong Kong’s street artists have left their mark with posters, stickers and stencil graffiti that attack some of the city’s most prominent politicians and business leaders.

The most recent example is a poster of Henry Tang Ying-yen, modelled on Barack Obama’s now-legendary “Hope” campaign poster, that depicts the government’s chief secretary laughing, with horns on his head and the Chinese character for “kill” branded on his forehead. “Devil” is written at the bottom, in English, along with a short phrase in Chinese: “Political reform killer.”

The poster, which first appeared in the streets last December, is the work of local street art crew Start from Zero, which until now has been known more for its black-and-white stencil art and t-shirt designs than for biting political commentary.

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Suitman Goes to Sham Shui Po

On a muggy day last summer, I was on Apliu Street looking for a used camera stall when I noticed a street DJ playing 1960s Chinese pop. Since the working-class neighbourhood of Sham Shui Po isn’t known for its street performers, I was surprised and took a closer look.

Lo and behold, it was Suitman, the Korean-American performance artist. His partner, Julia Kwan, was taking photos of the crowd as he performed. She told me that Suitman had been taking his DJ booth all around the city, to places like Soho and Sai Kung, and of all the places he’d been, it was Sham Shui Po that gave him the largest and most attentive audience.

Co-opting the Commercial Street

It’s hard to describe the sound of Sai Yeung Choi Street on a typical evening. It’s the echo of horns and sirens through the Mongkok canyons, the cacophony of video billboards and shop stereos. It’s the sound of sixteen thousand shoppers flocking each hour to the most crassly commercial of Hong Kong streets.

But there’s more to it than just shopping. Sai Yeung Choi Street is also the “West Dog-Dragon Cultural District,” a feisty theatre group’s response to government-led cultural initiatives like West Kowloon. (In Cantonese, dog and nine are homonyms, so Dog-Dragon and Kowloon are pronounced the same way.) Since 2003, FM Theatre Power (FTMP) has used the street as the base for its off-kilter performances, turning a shrine to consumerism into a haven for art.

“We want to engage Hong Kong people in the street, to break the barrier between them and performers,” says Banky Yeung, FMTP’s enigmatic creative director. “They’re not used to seeing street performances – they think it’s for beggars. They think that streets are only for walking or shopping. That attitude goes up into the government. We want to challenge these negative perceptions.”

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Hydro Pole Art

I found these plaques attached to a few hydro poles on Esplanade Avenue between Bernard and Saint-Viateur. I like how the copper plate etchings are a mischievous response to the official Hydro-Québec plates that are normally found on the poles. The wood one is striking for the way it mimics the natural texture of the pole, right down to the staples. As street art moves beyond the conventional media of paint, posters and stickers, it will be interesting to see it take on more unusual forms like this.

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This Way and That

Display Case

A ground floor window, if it’s close enough to the sidewalk, is the perfect vehicle for self-expression. When I was growing up in Calgary, I would walk along 17th Avenue every day, passing by an apartment window that was festooned with anti-war posters, music stickers and various other countercultural emblems. In Montreal, at the corner of Napoleon and Hôtel de Ville, this window is filled with a much more eclectic array of things.