Graffiti and Street Art in Hong Kong Pt. 2: Kwun Tong and Ngau Tau Kok

Click on any of the below images to open the gallery slideshow.

You can view the entire set of photos in this series (over 150 images) on Google Plus: Hong Kong Graffiti and Street Art Part 2: Kwun Tong and Ngau Tau Kok.

Sitting and thinking (I didn’t notice the toilet until I was checking the photos)

This piece has a strong three-dimensional feel to it.

Ether

Utah, Ether, Yumoh

Small stencil featuring a caricature of mainland Chinese artist and dissident Ai Wei Wei.

QUEST tags

JAL!

There is a gallery of works on the podium of this old building near the MTR station.

Art or Vandalism?

A Weathered Hand

Sattelite Dish Gazelle

The streets of the industrial areas of Kwun Tong and Ngau Tau Kok feature a lot of graffiti compared to other parts of Hong Kong.

The district is an indie culture hot spot. It’s a factory area, but the manufacturing industry declined steeply in the 1980s as mainland China started to embrace capitalism. Factories and, of course, factory jobs moved to China’s Guangdong province. The resulting empty floor space in factory buildings is now being frequently rented out as band practice rooms and art studios.

In the previous series on Mongkok graffiti and street art, almost every photo was taken in one alley—a kind of graffiti gallery. In contrast, the street art work in Kwun Tong and Ngau Tau Kok is spread out through the entire industrial part of the district (basically everything to West of the MTR rail line). It took around four hours to take all the photographs.

There seems to be more stencil work and pasteups (paperbased work that is done beforehand and then affixed to the wall) in this area of the city.

There is always the question of whether the artwork adds anything or whether it is just visual pollution and vandalism. I especially wonder about how the owners of the small mom-and-pop shops in the area feel when they come to work one morning and find their shutters covered in a hastily-drawn scrawl. The owners struggle hard working long hours to barely make ends meet; I don’t imagine they appreciate the new decorations.

The photos were taken with a Sony NEX-7 camera. The photos in this set are featured in the following video: