young chef and friends

After I’d recorded graffiti on industrial buildings alongside Sha Tau Kok Road in Scrawl on the Wall, I began to wonder whether, given the generally negative attitude towards graffiti in Hong Kong, I might find more examples in Fanling’s industrial area, where perhaps there wasn’t the same rush to paint over or wash off graffiti. I didn’t discover a lot, but this is a summary of what I managed to find.

Although all the traffic arteries in the industrial area run parallel to Sha Tau Kok Road, all the graffiti that I’ve found are on the walls of cross-lanes that are not used by motor vehicles, except for parking—where possible. I’ll start with an amusing graffito that I’ve walked past several times:

I’ve no idea who or what ‘Young CHEF’ might be, but it provides a kind of theme to what I’ve discovered elsewhere in the area. Here are three renditions of the tag ‘CHEF’ in three separate locations:

If these were painted by the same person or group, then I would expect them to be identical, but apart from the predominance of the colour blue, they are stylistically quite different. The fourth rendition of ‘CHEF’ doesn’t even follow the similarities of the previous three:

The last photo also includes the Chinese character lau, which can be both a surname and the adjective ‘fluid’, which is reflected in the way the base of the character appears to be dissolving. The mark on the right is not a genuine character, so I cannot comment on its significance.

I took the next photo, of an industrial building at the southern end of the industrial area, from a footbridge over the Ma Wat River:

And here are closer views of the three tags, from left to right:

I had thought, from a distance, that the right-hand tag spelled the word ‘CHEF’, but as you can see, it actually spells ‘CREW’. So these tags are the work of a group of people.

All the remaining photos were taken along a single cross-lane leading directly off Sha Tau Kok Road.

The first photo taken here shows an atypical ‘scrawl’, in that it isn’t just black:

The fat lettering in the next photo reflects the word: ‘SUMO’:

I’ve tried to decipher the next tag, without success, although Paula thinks it spells ‘SAFE’ and may be a reference to drugs:

In The Writing on the Fence, I described how graffiti that I’d come across in Manchester employed the motif of running paint. However, in that case, the graffiti had been meticulously executed merely to create the impression that the paint had been running. Here, the paint really has been running, although that was probably the artist’s intention:

And I can only guess at the significance of the word ‘COLA’, which doesn’t seem to be worth the effort of painting it on a wall.

My final image is the first I’ve seen reflecting the political situation in Hong Kong since the pro-democracy protests of 2019, when political slogans could be seen everywhere, but especially on the walls of underground pedestrian/cycling interchanges:

BELIEF!