Hong Kong — In the summer, you are shirtless and often smell sweat and ink. The suffering artist is constantly writing everywhere, including walls, underpasses, streetlight posts, and traffic light control boxes.
He covered Hong Kong’s public spaces with a vast jumble of Chinese characters and announced his unwavering belief that much of the Kowloon Peninsula was legitimately part of his family.
Throughout his life, graffiti artist Tsang Tsou-choi is a ubiquitous figure well known for his eccentric campaign, most striking as a unique personal mission, rather than the cry of a political rally. did.
But since the death of Mr. Tsang in 2007, Hong Kong has become a very different place. His work, once commonly seen, has now almost disappeared from the cityscape and is resonating in cities where many political expressions have been discontinued. By a drastic campaign against dissenting opinions after 2020.
“People thought he was completely crazy in his life, especially early on,” wrote the author of a new book, “The Indelible City: Disposition and Rebellion in Hong Kong,” which examines Mr. Tsang’s legacy. One Louisa Lim said. “Even when he died, no one was really interested in the content or political message of his work, but in reality he was these Hong Kong long before there were others. We were talking about prejudice — territory, sovereignty, confiscation and loss. “
When the work decades ago appeared earlier this year, it began to attract the crowd to such a non-trivial setting. The concrete railroad bridge was built on the road and was barely decorated except for the registration number and the warning against graffiti.
The bridge is located near the Bird Market and Sports Stadium on Boundary Street, a road that marks the edge of the territory that the Qing dynasty transferred to England in 1860 after the Second Opium War. It was covered in gray paint, some of which fell off this spring — just a mystery — Tsang’s work from several eras of painting in one of his favorite places. Reveals the palimpsest of.
Hong Kong artist Ram Siwing said it happened across the job on Boundary Street while he was out for a night walk in late March.
“I thought the old Hong Kong was greeting again,” he said.
The news of the discovery began to spread, and When In Doubt, a group of artists to which Mr. Lam belongs, described his discovery as a rare treasure. The group said it was one of the earliest artistic creations to discuss the increasingly pressing questions that are essential in Hong Kong. Who does the urban space belong to?
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The legitimacy of his territorial claim is questionable, but based on reading his own family tree, Mr. Tsang has become a kind of popular sovereignty in his own rights. He is now widely known as the “King of Kowloon”. His death at the age of 85 was fully reported in the local media, and some newspapers covered the cover with a rare character reserved for royalty.
Despite his fame, his work was often filled by local government workers who were tasked with keeping graffiti away.
But even if his art disappeared, the questions it posed became more relevant and disastrous, permeating the anti-democratic movement that involved Hong Kong in 2014 and 2019.
And while many of these protesters were too young to know the city where Mr. Tsang’s work was scattered, he covered public places with his own slogan, in the legislative council and other government buildings. Painted the symbol of Chinese authority.
“Over and over again, his ideas permeated the vitality of the city through the medium of calligraphy and into its veins,” Lim wrote in her new book.
The 2019 protest graffiti has almost completely disappeared, but Bruce Lee’s mantra “Be Water” and other messages adopted by demonstrators can be faintly visible on walls and sidewalks.
Similarly, there are few wreckage of Mr. Tsang’s thousands of works that once filled the city. Some, especially items he made on paper and other more portable media, were sold at auction. Hong Kong’s new museum, the M + collection, has more than 20 works, including wooden doors painted in ink.
But much more is hidden under the paint on the streets of the city.
Mr. Tsang has only been formalized for a few years, and some experts say that his writing is almost entirely done with the brushes and inks used in the gallons, not calligraphy in the formal Chinese tradition. I sniffed it. Still, his work was screened at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Sell $ 100,000..
Filled with a list of ancestors and the names of the places he claims, the style of his work is both in the writing detonator he used as a kid and in the text-rich ads that filled the city in the middle of the city. Researchers say it’s likely inspired by the 20th century.
Over the years, efforts to preserve Mr. Tsang’s work have been fragmented, and some have been destroyed by negligence. In 2017, a city contractor filled the work of an electric switch box near the University of the Arts, causing irreparable damage. Authorities said others were too badly degraded to justify protection.
Hong Kong’s mass transit agency, MTR Corporation, which owns a bridge on Boundary Street, said it was investigating ways to keep the site working, and said the Hong Kong government was providing technical advice.
Two Tsang works, a pillar near the Star Ferry Terminal at the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula and a streetlight pillar outside the public housing complex, were more than a decade ago in response to rising public demand in a clear plastic box. It was covered with. It will be saved.
Collector Willy Chung, who met Tsang in the early 1990s and spent years recording his work, helped create a petition to protect the arts. But he laments that there is no commemorative sign to tell passers-by about them. He has also documented dozens of other sites, but the official retention policy is still inconsistent, so be careful when publishing your location.
“There is still a lot of uncertainty,” he said.
For now, he visits regularly to check them and add protective coatings. After a rainy spring day, he traveled to several places in eastern Kowloon. At one point, he took out a small wire tool and removed a layer of glue that had accumulated from an advertisement on a streetlight pillar that Mr. Tsang painted many years ago. His character peeked under the gray paint and declared him the owner of the place.
Elsewhere, Mr. Chung crossed several lanes near the construction site. An embarrassed worker in a yellow helmet saw him walking past thorn bushes and plastic barriers towards a series of pillars. He scraped off traces of dead vines with a putty knife and then scraped off a layer of paint.
Gradually, the character became clearer. Please read “Tsang”. And on top of that is “China”. Once upon a time, snappy characters spread around pillars and nearby people. For now, they remain almost completely hidden.
“I hope the day will come when we can share this with everyone,” Chung said.