<p>Tsang Tsou-choi and the making of an icon</p>

Phoebe Wong

Long live the King of Kowloon

<p>I have always wondered if there have been any successful art movements in Hong Kong, besides the New Ink movement in the late 1960s–1970s. Perhaps the making of the self-proclaimed King of Kowloon could be considered to be one. Long before they began showing up in exhibitions and auctions in the 1990s, the characteristic black ink scrawls of Tsang Tsou-choi’s kingly persona had been appearing across public surfaces in Hong Kong. For decades, he had written his claims of sovereignty over the peninsula on anything from pillars, lampposts, and utility boxes to walls.</p><p>Tsang’s ascent from street vandal to art star was extraordinary, as were the critiques that his work ignited along the way. Even today, he remains an enigma – and not just because of the ancestral documents he apparently found in 1956, which led him to believe in his regal birthright. But because he had no intention of masquerading as an artist in the first place, his work tends to evade neat categorizations. That very few works by Tsang from before the 1990s exist is due to the simple fact that they were not regarded as artworks back then. Most of Tsang’s ink inscriptions, which asserted that his rightful position as King of Kowloon was stolen by colonial pretenders, were either washed away or painted over by city authorities which viewed them as graffiti. If any of his outdoor inscriptions survived from either before or during the 1990s, they did so because individuals like art critic Lau Kin-wai, photographer Simon Go, and curator Joel Chung systematically photographed his output.</p>

<p>Tsang’s elevation to artist was in fact the result of collective endeavour. Just like any urban myth, the Hong Kong people had become well aware of the King of Kowloon, with the mass media portraying him as either an enigmatic weirdo or completely mad. Then, Hong Kong’s art world took notice. From November – December 1992, a series of features appeared in the local arts magazine Crossover Weekly. Conceived as a search for the King of Kowloon, the texts praised his street works as ‘calligraphic masterpieces,’ speculated if Tsang even thought of himself as an artist, and asked if his works could be considered ‘installation art.’ The guest editor Sylvia Chan, an artist and educator, explained that she had chanced upon a television documentary about Tsang which had motivated her to make an open call for these features.</p><p>For a long time, I assumed this documentary was responsible for triggering the heightened interest in Tsang at the turn of the 1990s, and I have searched for it unsuccessfully over the years. But recently, I was directed to an article from 1978 by Lam Chi-yan (probably a pen name), written in the style of satirical fiction and published in a short-lived counterculture magazine. As elsewhere, Tsang was portrayed as a social oddity who led the life of a stray dog, but unlike other authors who dismissed Tsang’s ink inscriptions as acts of vandalism, Lam saw them as calligraphy, and even condemned the city’s cleaners who painted over them for their lack of artistic sensibility. While this early recognition of Tsang’s ‘artistic talent’ drew no resonance back then, it heralded what was to come.</p>

<p>Throughout the 1990s, Tsang’s ink writings appeared in William Tang’s fashion shows, on album covers, in magazines, and films, and even in an advertising campaign for washing detergent. The King of Kowloon became a cultural icon for the decade. A defining moment came in April 1997, when an infamous solo exhibition opened at the Goethe Institut in Hong Kong, curated by Lau Kin-wai, who admired Tsang’s unpretentious and intuitive personal style. This was followed in 1998 by a documentary on Tsang’s art by Martin Egan and Joanne Shen. Lau’s show, which affirmed Tsang’s unorthodox calligraphic aesthetic, immediately turned into a media event; the critic Shum Long-tin, among others, went so far as to storm the show and accuse Lau of exploiting Tsang. A flurry of opinions followed: some said street art should stay in the streets, while others argued that Tsang’s work should be considered within the history of public art and not calligraphy as it was framed by Lau and others. Another critic, Chin Wan, welcomed the controversy surrounding Tsang, saying that it provoked dialogues that renewed discourses around calligraphy as an art form.</p><p>Why did Tsang capture the imagination of the residents of Hong Kong in the 1990s? Perhaps in the years leading up to the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China, he reflected how we all felt: at once powerless and powerful. Perhaps the city’s inhabitants were moved by the tenacity of his unwavering diatribes against the British colonizers and his desire to reclaim his home. As critic Fung Man-yee put it, Tsang was ‘the last free man’ in the territory. (Fung would go on to launch an online petition to save his street calligraphy from erasure.) The art historian David Clarke observed Tsang’s ‘acute sense of the topography of power when pursuing his public mark-making,’ while the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist called Tsang an ‘urban poet’ who fought ‘against forgetting.’ In short, to borrow the words artist and writer Brandon LaBelle employs in his discussions of strategies of resistance, Tsang embodied ‘the weak and the radical.’</p>

<p>The same decade marked the restructuring of Hong Kong’s cultural policy and infrastructure. In response to requests by local artists, the Hong Kong Museum of Art organized ‘City Vibrance’ in 1992, a survey of local contemporary art that took place in the museum’s newly-built premises on the Kowloon waterfront. In hindsight, notes critic Siu King-chung, the show foreshadowed a wave of institutional critique in 1990s Hong Kong that evolved in tandem with the formation of alternative art spaces like Museum of Site (MOST), Para Site, and 1a space, all of which were made possible by the city’s new funding policy and an openness to outsider art. Just as Hou defined the King of Kowloon's radical proclamations as being ‘outside of any aesthetic canon of calligraphy,’ the local scene transformed itself, with Hong Kong’s artists and art spaces exploring ways of playing with, or even rejecting, prescribed artistic frames.</p><p>Of course, the making of a king is not complete without international recognition. In 1997, Tsang's works were included in the touring exhibition organized by Obrist and Hou, ‘Cities on the Move’ (1997–1999), which examined East Asia's blistering urban growth through art, architecture, and film. Then, he appeared in ‘Power of the Word,’ another travelling show, curated by Johnson Chang in 1999, which focussed on artistic interrogations of word and character by the likes of Gu Wenda and Xu Bing. In 2003 his work was featured in the Venice Biennale, where Hou included him in ‘Zone of Urgency,’ one of 10 exhibitions forming a constellation devised by the artistic director Francesco Bonami. By the time of his death in 2007, Tsang had developed an enviable art resumé, which continued to grow after his passing. In 2011, Joel Chung organized ‘Memories of King Kowloon,’ an extensive retrospective at ArtisTree in Hong Kong, including over 300 works and documents. Then in 2013, the monograph, <em>King of Kowloon: The Art of Tsang Tsou-choi</em>, edited by David Spalding with a foreword by Hans Ulrich Obrist, was released.</p>

<p>Tsang’s legacy continues to defy categorization. His work has been exhibited in major galleries and institutions such as Ota Fine Arts and Tai Kwun in Hong Kong, most recently as part of the latter’s review of ink painting ‘INK CITY.’ His writings on cloth have appeared in multiple sales at Sotheby’s, including one in 2016 that was introduced with a pre-sale show titled ‘They Would be Kings,’ which placed Tsang among international graffiti legends, from Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Banksy. This international framing shifted the focus from Tsang as a calligraphy painter back to the King of Kowloon as a graffiti artist – just as a slip by the translator of Leung Ping-kwan’s Chinese verse, ‘Pun Choi on New Year’s Eve’, which describes Tsang as a man who doodles on the wall, in the English version instead labels Tsang as a graffiti artist. In reality, he is somewhere in between.</p><p>Perhaps this fluidity of definition is in keeping with Tsang’s one-man movement. As his popularity soared in the last decade of his life, Tsang calligraphed on any surface provided, from vehicles, lanterns, jugs, printed maps, and doors, to sheets of paper. Throughout it all, he maintained an amicable ambivalence. More than once in front of the camera, he said, with his typical grin, that he was unbothered if his ink writings were considered art or otherwise. To continue writing was all that mattered to him.</p>

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<p>Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1.&nbsp;Tsang Tsou Choi (King of Kowloon), <em>Untitled </em>(detail),<em> 2</em>000-2004. 2.&nbsp;Tsang Tsou Choi (King of Kowloon), <em>Untitled</em> (detail), 2001&nbsp;. 3.&nbsp;Tsang Tsou Choi (King of Kowloon), <em>Untitled</em> (detail),<em>&nbsp;</em>1997-1999. All images courtesy of&nbsp;Willie Chung Yin Chai.</p>

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