Just outside, a graffiti-covered wall includes a striking illustration of two vast hands clutching a can of spray paint. Can you afford to do and is your drive strong enough to do it?”Īt a recently opened shop called 400ml dedicated to selling graffiti supplies in Beijing’s trendy 798 Art Zone, Taiwanese rap music blares out of the speaker system and artists from different crews loll on sofas chatting nonchalantly. “The idea of a 20-year-old having a disposable income, that’s a new thing in China. Lance Crayon, director of the documentary Spray Paint Beijing, has noted the change. As China’s economy has boomed, however, rising income levels, relative political stability, and the one-child policy has created a new generation of young people with money to burn. Just thirty years ago splashing cash on creating art that might get painted over tomorrow would have been unthinkable. On the other, graffiti artists are attempting to make Chinese cities – long defined by pervasive politics and, more recently, commercial interests – their own. On the one hand the art is reserved for the emerging middle classes who can afford expensive cans of paint and pricey fines. In China, however, graffiti artists occupy an altogether different space. In America graffiti is often associated with poor, disintegrating neighbourhoods and is viewed as a tool for the dispossessed to carve out an identity. Others, like Camel, want a new way to have their voice heard. Many are attracted by adding splashes of colour to the generic and drab architecture in China’s endlessly grey capital. But while the numbers remain tiny – around 40 in a city of 20 million according to their own estimations – the culture is slowly taking root. “In China we can’t talk about things, we must find other ways to show we are angry,” shrugs the 22-year-old.Ĭamel, a member of the crew ‘Margin’ (“because we are marginal people,” he says), is one of only a handful of graffiti artists tagging or signing their names in public spaces in Beijing today. It was, however, a small price to pay for the act of expression. The portrait was painted over and the artist was asked to hand 3,000RMB ($500) to the police. (In the same year a manual leaked online stated that chengguan should, when carrying out orders to quell dissent, “take care to leave no blood on the face, no wounds on the body, and no people in the vicinity.”) In 2009 Camel spray-painted a wall in Beijing with an image of a chengguan, one of China’s despised urban management police, seen by much of the population as brutish bullies. We just want to try and say something in our own way.” “The purpose is not to make the city more beautiful. “The city is like a system and graffiti is like a virus,” says ‘Camel’, a hip young Chinese graffiti artist who sports a cap, sunglasses, and wispy goatee.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |