February 21st, 2010
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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January 24th, 2010
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.
January 7th, 2010
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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December 18th, 2009
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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December 15th, 2009
Macau
December 4th, 2009
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.
December 1st, 2009
Street art on Duluth and St. Viateur streets, Montreal
November 3rd, 2009
Montreal doesn’t seem to have been hit terribly hard by this latest crise économique, maybe because it has spent most of the recent past recovering from a string of much more substantial crises. At the very least, it has given us a break from the excesses of the previous years, a time to reflect on what had been going on. Some of the economic victims of the crisis, like the misguided Griffintown redevelopment project, are better off dead.
In any case, I enjoyed seeing the Berlin-based French artist SP-38‘s “Vive la crise!” posters around town. (He’s also responsible for an earlier spate of posters that read “Vive la bourgeoisie!” and “Vive la poésie!”) It’s a childish, contrarian exclamation, but it rings true to our instincts that the current season of change and contemplation is maybe, in some ways, a bit better than the blind exuberance of before.
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July 16th, 2009
When I wrote about the political and cultural importance of posters (not to mention their aesthetic contribution to the city by making it look messy and lived-in), I never considered that they could also have an environmental benefit. Luckily, two artists in Toronto, Eric Cheung and Sean Martindale, have demonstrated exactly how this can be done: they’ve turned lamppost posters into tiny planters.
How’d they do it? Spacing’s Jake Schabas has the answers. “First, they cut triangular shapes directly into the thick existing poster layers. Then they peeled back those layers, wrapping the outside edge of the cut-out posters back into the pole to form the cones.
“Only staples were needed to hold the cones in place and support the soil and flowers planted, with some cones needing extra poster paper wheat-pasted onto the underside. All of the cones have an aeration hole at the bottom and are placed in a corkscrew patter that allows water to flow from one plant to the next.”
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July 15th, 2009
I spotted my first ghost bike — a memorial to a fallen bicyclist — on Second Avenue in the East Village, chained to a signpost sprouting from the quiet little park in front of the the old stone St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery church. Perhaps that’s why it seemed both dissonant and appropriate — despite the proximity of the street, it seemed unlikely that the tranquil square could have been the site of so many bicyclists’ deaths. At the same time, it was wholly natural to memorialize them near an 18th century churchyard. A closer look revealed that may have been precisely the thinking behind this ghost bike, dedicated to all the New York bicyclists who had lost their lives on the streets over the last year.
The ghost bike movement began as the solo effort of San Francisco artist Jo Slota in 2003. By the next year, a full memorial project was underway in St. Louis. Several artists groups’ ghost bike initiatives coalesced into The New York City Street Memorial Project in 2007, one of 87 ghost bike projects documented in 14 countries worldwide. In New York, the memorials have an impressive geographic scope, spread from the southern tip of Staten Island to reaches of eastern Queens far beyond the end of most subway lines.
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July 14th, 2009
Top left photo by John Batten; others by Christopher DeWolf
The brown leather chesterfield sits incongruously amid the parked buses, concrete paving and grey metal railings at the Tai Hang bus terminus. In the afternoon heat, a cat stretches over the length of the sofam but after sunset, it’s where bus drivers and passers-by sit and relax.
This kind of improvised street furniture is what arts writer and heritage activist John Batten calls vernacular or “nonchalant” art, an umbrella term for the everyday objects, street life and informal interventions in public spaces that are close to the heart of this city’s character.
“Hong Kong is a place that’s open to free expression, which is reflected in the clutter of our public spaces, our footbridges and ferry forecourts,” says Batten. “All of these bits of vernacular art and architecture are part of who we are. People overlook [such] simple things. But if you take them away, what are you left with?”
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May 7th, 2009
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April 2nd, 2009
One of the last remains of Tsang Tsou Choi’s work, now protected by a special coating and latex screen
During his lifetime, the King of Kowloon was seen by the Hong Kong government as little more than a nuisance. But that was before the Star Ferry incident raised public awareness about identity, culture and heritage issues. So in 2007, after the King—also known as Tsang Tsou Choi, the oldest graffiti writer in the world—passed away, the government promised to do everything it could to preserve what was left of his distinctive graffiti.
Turns out the government isn’t capable of doing much. Although it was quick to spray a protective coating on a prominent piece of Tsang’s work at the Tsim Sha Tsui Star Ferry pier, the South China Morning Post reveals that many other pieces, especially those near Tsang’s home in Kwun Tong, remain unprotected and vulnerable to decay and vandalism. (The SCMP article is locked behind a paywall, but you can see a short slideshow they produced about the remains of Tsang’s work, which I’ve embedded below.) Lau Kin Wai, an artist and friend of Tsang, hopes to draw attention to the matter by holding a protest this weekend at the Star Ferry pier.
In the Legislative Council, opposition lawmaker Alan Leong has made a fuss about the preservation of Tsang’s graffiti, which prompted a sheepish response from the Home Affairs Bureau yesterday. Maybe, it said, the government would simply take some photos of Tsang’s graffiti, rather than preserve its actual physical remains. If you forget that the government is trying to tiptoe around its own promise, that the remaining works would be protected after Tsang died, its position almost makes sense. Graffiti is, after all, a inherently ephemeral form of art. It isn’t meant to last. In most cases, I’d hesitate before throwing my support behind a government effort to preserve a piece of graffiti.
But this is a special case. Tsang was unique: he was making political statements, not artistic ones, and his graffiti stands alone for its distinctive form of Chinese calligraphy. Preserving his work will keep his spirit in the streets. Besides, Hong Kong doesn’t have a rich tradition of graffiti. Just a few neighbourhoods have street art of any note and none of it is particularly inventive or cutting-edge. By making a deliberate effort to include Tsang’s graffiti in the canon of Hong Kong heritage, the government will demonstrate that street art and public political statements remain a vital part of the city’s identity.
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March 26th, 2009
Lowrise to parking lot conversion, Toronto, 2008
