Language Matters | With M+ museum collecting Hong Kong graffiti and neon art, we trace the roots of those words

The ‘King of Kowloon’ was writing protest graffiti in Hong Kong before modern US graffiti emerged in the 1960s

The city was also famous for neon signs, which have mostly disappeared, and both art forms are preserved at the newly opened M+ museum of visual culture

Reading Time:2 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

Graffiti covers a a subway train in New York in 1980. Photo: Getty Images

Lisa Lim

Published: 8:45am, 12 Nov 2021Updated: 3:39pm, 15 Nov 2021

“Let there be language” proclaims the award-winning 2016 neon artwork The Act of Creation, by Joe and Zata Banks. Indeed, there is much language to be pondered in modern visual culture, typically in graffiti and neon art.

Graffiti – plural of graffito, from the Italian graffio, meaning “a scratch” – originally referred to drawings or writings scratched on walls and surfaces, seen on ancient walls in Pompeii and Rome. Only in the 1960s did graffiti come to be used for words or images marked (usually illegally) in public places, such as the modern urban graffiti that first appeared in Philadelphia and on New York subway trains.

Graffiti is widely studied as a vehicle for creating and contesting meanings, especially in articulating resistance to dominant powers.

In Hong Kong, such urban art was pioneered by the late Tsang Tsou-choi, the “King of Kowloon”, who started before modern graffiti emerged in New York. In his use of brush and a mixture of black ink and paint, his work evokes the traditional literary discipline of Chinese calligraphy, but for canvases he used Hong Kong’s lamp posts and electrical boxes.

Let There Be Language by Joe Banks and Zata Banks.

Untitled Pair of Wooden Doors by King of Kowloon Tsang Tsou-choi. Photo: Red Dog Studios

While mostly painted over, Tsang’s surviving work is now protected in public and included in M+, the museum of visual culture, marking official recognition of indigenous, traditional forms of writing in a public space as an important element of cultural heritage.

SCMP Series

The M+ issue

[ 7 of 15 ]

Language Matters | With M+ museum collecting Hong Kong graffiti and neon art, we trace the roots of those words

The ‘King of Kowloon’ was writing protest graffiti in Hong Kong before modern US graffiti emerged in the 1960s The city was also famous for neon signs, which have mostly disappeared, and both art forms are preserved at the newly opened M+ museum of visual culture

The ‘King of Kowloon’ was writing protest graffiti in Hong Kong before modern US graffiti emerged in the 1960s

The city was also famous for neon signs, which have mostly disappeared, and both art forms are preserved at the newly opened M+ museum of visual culture