blessing or curse?

I’ve noted before that graffiti are widely regarded as a form of vandalism in Hong Kong, and while I’ve not seen anything that matches the complexity of graffiti that I’ve seen in European cities, there is definitely a graffiti subculture in the territory. This is my latest report on what I’ve seen in Fanling.

All the graffiti that I recorded in Scrawl on the Wall, apart from that on the back wall of the Shell petrol station on Sha Tau Kok Road, has since been painted over or washed off, but new examples have since appeared, albeit not on the buildings that bore the graffiti I featured in that post. In fact, the majority of the graffiti that I’ve included in this post were located on the walls of one of the two pedestrian underpasses that are the only way to cross Sha Tau Kok Road—a dual carriageway—between its junctions with Fan Leng Lau Road and Ma Sik Road.

I was walking through the more easterly of these underpasses back in November when I saw this:

I was immediately surprised, because this was the first example I’d seen in Fanling of graffiti that included colour, not just black lines. It’s also two Chinese characters—shek tin (‘stone heaven’ from right to left—although I can’t guess what it means).

This is the side ramp leading back up to street level, with the graffito in the previous photo visible on the right:

To my delight, there were several more graffiti on the walls of this ramp, but before I include them here, this is a message on the opposite corner:

It translates as ‘Blessings come to Fanling’! You can also see the straight-on exit ramp in this photo.

And these are the other graffiti I saw as I ascended the side ramp:

The next graffito is not an attempt to write a rude word—fuk is Cantonese for ‘blessing’ (the Chinese character is on the right):

‘CREW’ is a common tag in this area:

And another ‘Fuk1’, this time without the colour fill:

The next two examples were located on the walls of the straight-on exit ramp and include yet another ‘Fuk1’, this time with a different body colour:

There was also a ‘Fuk1’ tag on the wall of the industrial building directly behind the Shell petrol station, which I noticed when cycling past, but when, a couple of days later, I went to photograph it, I discovered that it had already been painted over.

A day or two after this unfortunate discovery, I decided to check out the other underpass to see whether there were any examples of graffiti there. On my way, I spotted another ‘CREW’ on the back wall of the public toilet in Luen Wo Hui:

This is a view of the more westerly underpass, looking south towards Fanling’s industrial area:

There was yet another ‘Fuk1’, in yet another colour, and a second rendition of the ‘7RTC’ that I photographed in the first underpass (I’m guessing the first character of this tag):

This is a photo that I took several weeks later in the second underpass:

The ‘LOVE is EVERYWHERE’ slogan has appeared since in two other locations (see below), and it looks like each was written by a different person.

I’ve been wandering around Fanling’s industrial district recently to see whether I could find any more graffiti here. There is none on the main streets carrying motor traffic, but there is quite a lot on the walls of the many cross lanes. I like this one:

It’s a Chinese character that means ‘make a noise’!

This is a view of the back of a commercial building on the banks of the Ma Wat River:

I featured the three tags on the left, which include another ‘CREW’, in Young Chef and Friends, and they haven’t been cleaned off, but the two on the right are new. One is another ‘make a noise’:

…while I’m unable to say what the other might mean:

I’ve included this ‘CREW’ because of the signs that earlier graffiti here have been washed off:

There used to be quite a few ‘CHEF’ graffiti hereabouts, but this is the only one that I’ve seen recently:

And this ‘Fuk1’ is stylistically different to the others, with the surrounding purple embellishments, which together with the differences in body colour of the other examples above leads me to conjecture that they were done by different people:

I also found two more ‘Fuk1’ outlines in cross lanes hereabouts:

I’ve included the ‘LET’S MOVE’ message on the right of this second outline because I think that the people responsible for the graffiti in this area feel persecuted and want to find a location where their work isn’t scrubbed off weeks or even days after it has been executed:

The next two photos in this collection were taken on the exit ramp from the underpass on which the first photos above were taken:

The green and purple tag, which was probably executed by the same person who created the graffito in one of the photos above, appeared just a couple of days after all the earlier graffiti here had been washed off.

My final photograph is another example of the ‘LOVE IS EVERYWHERE’ message:

The second character on the left means ‘Buddhist’, which may be relevant to the message.

Although graffiti in this area doesn’t last long, I will continue to look, because you never know what you might find here, or anywhere else.