South China Morning Post
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SCMP Series
The M+ issue
7 of 15
3
Why a Tokyo sushi bar is a star exhibit at M+ museum in Hong Kong
Kiyotomo, a former Tokyo sushi bar, has been rebuilt on the second floor of the M+ Museum in Hong Kong as a testament to the subtle minimalism of its designer, Japanese architect Shiro Kuramata. Photo: M+/Lok Cheng
4
The M+ museum finally opens – but will it boost cultural tourism?
As an addition to Hong Kong’s tourism portfolio, M+ will prob­ably be a hit – but it may not put the city on the cultural tourism map as firmly as once hoped. Photo: AFP
5
Think the King of Kowloon was eccentric? Meet ancient China’s Ni Zan
Graffiti painter Tsang Tsou-choi, also known as the King of Kowloon, prepares for a solo exhibition in 1997. Photo: Dickson Lee
6
Hong Kong dancers explore home and identity in Home Sweat Home
Hong Kong dancers explore home and identity in Home Sweat Home. CCDC’s Shirley Lok rehearses for the production. Photo: Lester Leung
7
Hong Kong street art: where the words ‘neon’ and ‘graffiti’ came from
Graffiti covers a a subway train in New York in 1980. Photo: Getty Images
8
When West Kowloon Cultural District plans were launched, and what followed
British architect Norman Foster stands next to a model of his winning proposal for the West Kowloon cultural and entertainment complex in 2002. His plan was scrapped in 2006 on cost grounds, but his firm won the tender to implement a revised blueprint in 2011. Photo: SCMP
9
New thinking about the Chinese contemporary art at M+ collected by Uli Sigg
Yin Xiuzhen’s 2001 work “Portable City: Beijing” from the Uli Sigg collection of Chinese contemporary art catalogued in a 500-page book edited by Pi Li. Photo: M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong/Yin Xiuzhen.
10
‘My camera became an extension of my hand’: John Fung on his photography
Hong Kong photographer John Fung at the IFC in Central, Hong Kong. He says living in the present is what informs his art. Photo: Antony Dickson
11
How museums arose in Asia and the man who lent them impetus in Hong Kong
Arnaldo de Oliveira Sales, long-time chairman of the Urban Council, was a key figure in the growth of museums in post-war Hong Kong. Photo: SCMP
12
Cocktails in a library, Munch’s The Scream x 3: cultural tourism in Oslo
The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, housing works by Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Cindy Sherman among others, has been joined on the Norwegian capital’s waterfront by the Munch Museum, and a National Museum opens in 2022. Photo: Getty Images
> More on this Series
Graffiti covers a a subway train in New York in 1980. Photo: Getty Images
Opinion
Language Matters
by Lisa Lim
Language Matters
by Lisa Lim

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
Lisa Lim
Lisa Lim
Why you can trust SCMP

“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.

Neon, from Greek νέον, “new”, was the name given by British chemists to the gas they isolated in 1898. When trapped in glass tubes and electrified, it lit up, giving us neon lighting, initially for commercial advertising then as an artistic medium. Text-based neon art burgeoned from the 1960s in philosophical or playful explorations of language and meaning.

Before ‘King of Kowloon’ Hong Kong barely had any graffiti. Look at it now

Other work – such as Joi T. Arcand’s ēkawiya nepēwisi (2019), “don’t be shy” in Cree, representing the Plains Cree glyph system in neon – speaks to issues of revitalising and promoting indigenous languages in contemporary public spaces.

Hong Kong’s once ubiquitous neon signs are a striking contemporary adaptation of the Chinese tradition of integrating calligraphy into architecture, typically as vertically arranged couplets and horizontal banners adorning entranceways and interiors.

Although Hong Kong’s neon is fast disappearing, several artefacts and more than 4,000 images now in M+’s permanent and online collections preserve and illuminate this visual urban vernacular of Hong Kong’s heritage.

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