had to take some guests from out of town to macau & managed to find a who new set of graffiti there (click to see macau graffiti from my last trip). i left them to take picts of the church while i went & snapped these by beco de roma.
all children of the ’80s have to love the ode to gameboy, & i’m a big fan of the skeleton. take a closer look at the details on that one, it’s pretty cool. (& yes, at least that one is a start from zero work. who knew they did more than hong kong graffiti?)
i walk by this hong kong graffiti quote almost every day outside a construction site between king’s & electric road in tin hau. thankfully i finally remembered to stop & get a picture.
not sure if this completely qualifies as graffiti (well, neither did my last hong kong graffiti post), but love it anyway. the quotation marks around “beat” always remind me to visit one of my favorite — and truly nerdy — websites, the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks.
went up to the jubilee (shing mun) reservoir on a hong kong history walk/tour/talk with jason wordie and found an example of some of the older hong kong graffiti you’ll find.
this marking was left by the victorious japanese army under colonel doi teishichi when they defeated the british battalion stationed here in 1941. unfortunately no one is lining up to preserve the complex, interconnected network of tunnels that once helped to hold off the japanese forces.
if you do make it out to the tunnels (i highly suggest going with wordie and hearing all the background from him), you’ll see that the tunnels were named after london streets to help the middlesex regiment manning the site to better get their bearings.
the fall of the shing mun redoubt/jubilee reservoir and its surrounding areas — which cut hong kong’s water supplies — paved the way for the japanese to take over the rest of kowloon.
a couple of more photos from the tunnels:
was in chengdu last weekend visiting the panda reserve (see some picts below) & a friend. there wasn’t much interesting graffiti but did come across this piece down a small alley near the main mao statue.
i love that last photo, so similar to what many friend look like on a lazy sunday afternoon.
was walking in sheung wan & it turned, more or less, into a hunt for start from zero’s work. guessing the sfz guys are pink floyd fans — those first three wheatpaste picts were dotted along queen’s road. the fourth pict of the empty space was interesting since it looked like one of the construction logo knock-off (image 5, from tin hau) used to be there.
if you look behind the space in image four, you’ll see a ribbon. got a close up it — a sfz calling card.
had to include the final pict of a pawn shop that i shot near one of the odes to floyd. with the shadows across it, it seemed like something that you’d see in an old hong kong film.
feel like someone’s watching you in central? might be more than the person on the next bar stool.
to avoid the crowds when walking from causeway bay to happy valley i ducked behind a row of houses & found these (cheeky) free-style hong kong graffiti pictures.
to go back to “sesame street” days & play “which one’s not like the others”, the last image here only belongs with the set due to geography: it’s done on what looks like a kind of paste & the image is pretty complex, it looks almost painted on.
went to discovery bay to visit some friends, & almost walked right past this koala in hiding on the boardwalk. there was remarkably little tagging out there (& sadly no laundry detergent boxes in the windows either), so this was a pretty nice surprise amidst the perfectly manicured flowerbeds.
lamma (南丫島) feels like worlds away from hong kong, perfect for a quick day trip. someone with a spray can & a few new stencils to test out beat me there though, leaving an anti-consumerism message (photo 1), mao bust & a tasteful nude to line the walk to the beach. i’m a fan of how photo 5 turned out, our shadows somehow work into the shot perfectly. wonder when we’ll see these stencils popping up in central.
although i generally stick to graffiti photos, couldn’t help including a couple from our day out there, we couldn’t have asked for better weather. check out photo 9: a local man (maybe in his 70s or 80s) who has a small vegetable farm/patch & grows all his produce organically (minus the certification). you can buy veggies from him as you pass, but if you don’t make it you’ll probably get a taste anyway since some of the local restaurants buy from him as well.
there’s so much more to macau than its casino-dominated, tourist-packed reputation suggests. walk down the city’s smaller streets to get away from the religious relic-seeking masses to see some local art work.
most of these were taken in a single alley off rua da pedro nolasco da silva.