facing the wall

At the beginning of last month, Paula and I cycled ‘down south’ for the first time since 2019. Although this option is the easiest way to rack up 100km in a day’s ride, because it’s almost exclusively on cycle tracks, we’ve been avoiding it since the start of the pandemic because it involves riding through built-up areas and thus coming into closer contact with people than we would like.

At one point on this ride, we passed a wall that was ‘decorated’ with graffiti. However, I didn’t want to stop and thus inconvenience Paula if I spent an inordinate amount of time taking photographs, but last Thursday I decided to go out by myself because Paula would be busy. One of my objectives was to photograph the wall, and what follows is the result.

However, before I reached the wall, just after leaving Taipo, I just happened to notice some interesting images on the noise screen separating the expressway from the cycle track:

In addition to the anthropomorphic guitars on the parapet of the bridge over the railway and expressway in Sheung Shui, photos of which I included in A Grand Day Out, I’ve seen identical images of guitars in at least three other locations. However, all these are black, and what grabbed my attention here is that all six guitars are different colours. The style is the same though, so it’s safe to assume that they are all the work of the same artist.

And notice the panel to the right of the guitars:

There’s an obvious connection between these six flowers, the faces of which all carry the same expression, and the guitars. The colours of the flowers mirror those of the guitars! And the wavy lines, top to bottom, are the same colours as the flowers, right to left. So it is a reasonable conjecture to suggest that both guitars and flowers were painted by the same person. I shall have to look out for flower/guitar connections in other locations.

The cycle track crosses the Shing Mun River via the most northerly bridge accessible to pedestrians and cyclists when it eventually reaches Shatin. On the far side of the river, a left turn leads to the new town of Ma On Shan, named after a nearby mountain, while if you follow the cycle track to the right here, this is what you will see after about 1.2km:

The following six photos provide more detail of the graffiti here, from right to left:

No! I don’t know what Bufu is, or what it’s doing in a hamburger.

One of the people responsible for these images is presumably called Jimmy. And bufu makes another appearance. The Chinese characters in the blue ovoid with crown read ‘move it!’.

The red characters read ‘no(t) two’, although whether they have any connection with the meditating figure underneath I’m unable to say. The characters below the yellow face are heavily stylized and are thus difficult to interpret, although the first two probably read ‘broken heart’. Mind you, the yellow face doesn’t look particularly broken-hearted!

There is only one word to describe the face wearing a hat that is much too small for it: silly; although whether it’s meant to be a counterpoint to the rather menacing face to the left is impossible to say. The Chinese characters may read ‘heal the soul’, although the fifth character has been smudged and is now almost illegible. the blue marks translate as ‘breathe’ from right to left.

Of course, everyone recognizes Michelin Man, and the arms of the raindrop look like hearts to me (the Chinese character is ‘drink’). I can’t help but wonder whether the eyes of the sideways silly face are meant to double as half of a butterfly, given what appears to be a pair of antennae above. The graffito below the face appears to be a quotation, but what is being quoted is anyone’s guess, although my guess is ‘believe in yourself’.

I’m curious about the reasoning behind the anthropomorphic pill bottle, and the blue homunculus is in an identical pose to a light brown one in an earlier photo. Of course, one can always enjoy a steaming bowl of noodles.

Finally, this is a view looking back along the wall. I didn’t realize that I’d cut off the left-hand face when taking the previous photo:

Incidentally, the small white rectangles that you can see in some of the photos read ‘POST NO BILLS’, in English and Chinese. Of course, these graffiti are not bills; nevertheless, on the grounds that the owner(s) of this wall don’t want bills, they probably don’t want graffiti either, so I expect them to be scrubbed off before long.

I haven’t seen any more graffiti anywhere in this area, although I’m always on the lookout. The mural that I described in Down by the Riverside is on the opposite side of the river, while the mural in Ma On Shan that I featured in Tunnel Vision, which I cycled past on Thursday, was seriously damaged by protesters in 2019. Why they chose to daub their slogans across such a wonderful mural, when the opposite wall of the tunnel was completely clear, helped to change my attitude towards the protest movement.