words katherine reedy

The “Invasian” has begun in the world of street art.

The stencilled black figure is hardly noticeable, unless you’re looking. It rests at the foot of a telephone pole just outside the MTR station at East Tsim Sha Tsui and depicts an armoured tank, its cannon trained on nearby Nathan Road. A slogan above the tank ≠reads “We Fight for Graffiti” in the block letters of military propaganda.

This carefully crafted piece is premeditated, ironic, and painstakingly applied. It is a far cry from the bare-bones, self-styled calligraphy of the King of Kowloon, or anarchic scribblers whose markings are viewed by many as a form of urban blight. It is closer to the brand of graffiti, aka ‘street art’, that garners exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London and fetches millions of dollars on the mass market when produced by its celebrity practitioners. (A Banksy drawing went for nearly $2 million USD at Sotheby’s this year.) This huge popularity begs the question: What fight?

In Hong Kong, it is a skirmish for style. HK is one of Asia’s graffiti hot-spots, and its artists have taken on a tremendous task: to wrest and redefine graffiti style from its New York roots in hopes of claiming a stake in the genre for Asian artists.

The fighters come from different paths. Jay is a 30-something graphic designer and UK native. He has been working creatively in Hong Kong for 14 years, and his current commercial endeavour, his “grown-up business” in his words, is ChinaStylus, a mainstream design firm. In his bright SoHo office, festooned with pieces of street art, staff tweak corporate logos on their shiny Apple desktops. (Like many other supporters of street art, he’s not averse to commerce.)

But Jay is also the man behind ST/ART, a collective of around a dozen street artists who have been collaborating on projects and exhibitions since 2005. As another means of supporting the medium, he sells spray cans to erstwhile taggers, for about $35 each. “We provide the paint, they do what they want,” he says, grinning.

His see-no-evil approach is not without warrant. Graffiti is in the law books as a form of vandalism, through a regulation passed in 1998. Even so, it has less of a stigma than in Western countries, where it is often associated with gangs and crime. One graffitist in Hong Kong said police who caught her pasting up a new poster believed her when she said her cans of glue were for eating. Others say police here don’t often know what graffiti is. In contrast, New York’s Citywide Vandals Task Force arrested nearly 4,000 graffitists in 2007.

With little trouble from authorities, local graffitists face few external constraints, and Jay says that in the past five to 10 years, artists have been free to pioneer new forms of script. “Traditional graffiti follows a style, follows the original New York style, really, to a greater or lesser extent. There are people working now with Chinese characters, which is really great to see. It’s really hard, that’s why not many people do it.”
But for those who do, it has become a passion. Xeme and Friendly (their tag names), a couple of savvy 20-somethings, are driven by a mission to develop the scene. This summer they launched graffiti culture’s first pan-Asian publication, Invasian magazine, with the aim “to introduce the Asian graffiti scene as well as the Asian subcultures to the world”. On its pages, photographs of graffiti dialects from Japan to the Philippines illustrate Asian street art scripts.

“I thought, ‘I’ve been writing in Chinese for 20-plus years. Why would I find it hard to write [graffiti] in [it]?’” says Xeme. “The only thing I’ve found hard is that there’s no reference.” The main inspiration for HK graffitists was the ultimate outsider artist, the King of Kowloon, Tsang Tsou-choi, who died last summer at the age of 86 after a long career of scrawling Chinese calligraphy over city surfaces. His handwritten graffiti was groundbreaking, but nothing like the requisite spraypainted letters.

And that’s where the Invasian crew hopes to take the medium. Xeme also runs a website, Urban Messenger, where he posts snapshots of local artwork and hosts a forum that connects local graffitists. He and Friendly are behind competitions and get-togethers like the Wall Lords graffiti jam in mid-August, which will feature simultaneous events in Hong Kong, Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. They are adamant that what they do – spraypainting – is more elementary than street art, or design. “The difference is that [street artists] have more of a message with their kind of stuff, that they want to spread in each of their works. For me, it’s more strictly promoting ourselves for no reason, just tagging up our names,” says Xeme.

According to Friendly, Asian street art is under international surveillance. “People from abroad want to see what we can do,” she says. “Actually, the first person who taught me to do Chinese characters, like eight years ago, was a foreigner. They are all waiting for something new and different.” Jay from ST/ART agrees. “It’s refreshing and different and could only be from here, you know? Other than that, it’s still quite a baby scene here. It’s still developing. You get more and more people getting into it.”

“It is like a global revolution,” adds Xeme. “Not really like a rebellion, but like an art revolution that had never happened in the past. So many people worldwide have picked up a spray can and done something artistic on the street.” The pair has even heard of new artists in places as far-flung as Tibet and Mongolia. “I didn’t even know they had walls there!” jokes Friendly.

Another tagger, Eric, who signs himself C# (that’s C-sharp), works with both graffiti and street art. (He, like the other artists, prefers not to divulge his family name.) A trained artist with a penchant for the thrills of tagging, he says he spraypaints with local friends but also produces stickers and posters with graphically advanced cartoons. Like the Invasian posse, he hopes to see more Chinese characters in graffiti, and, ultimately, wants “graffiti and street art to be seen as part of modern art.”

“What we are thinking is that we are trying to develop some Chinese characters. We were influenced by New York and European countries, but we want to develop our own style, so that when people come here they will see Hong Kong-style graffiti,” he asserts.

His own style, however, wasn’t born on Hong Kong’s byways. At school in England, a teacher encouraged him to mix Chinese and English characters in his art, and then showed him the basics of graffiti writing. After school, he returned to Hong Kong for work, met up with local urban artists, and has been in the scene ever since.

Even those not pioneering new scripts are driven to make a name for themselves in other ways. Tat and Vikki, a polished design outfit and street-art duo who use the handle Graphic Airlines, are more inclined to build their brand and produce commentary on society.

“I draw a sketch every day – almost every day,” says Tat, a lanky, laconic 20-something. “To make a big poster takes maybe one week. We go bombing [putting up new pieces] maybe twice a month.” Vikki, who sports a shock of bleach-blonde hair, says her signature design – a fat-cheeked face squeezed into a restrictive circle – is a statement against commercialism in Hong Kong. “My work is usually based on a idea, something I want to say, something I want to criticize,” she says.

As for the ‘Fight for Graffiti‘ stencil, Xeme nods his head and smiles when it’s mentioned. “That was this guy from Taiwan,” he says. In Hong Kong and beyond, graffitists are blazing a path for new styles - a street art renaissance in cities across Asia.