Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities

First published in the UK in 2015 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2015 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by

any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or

otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library.

Copy-editor: MPS Technologies

Typesetting: Contentra Technologies

Cover designer: Shin-E Chuah

Cover Image: Graffiti Avenue in Huangjueping, Chongqing, China. Courtesy

of Yong Wang.

Production manager: Amy Rollason

Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-453-3

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-454-0

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-455-7

Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I: Carnival on the Street—Visual Order and its (Pseudo-)Reversion

Chapter 1: A Twisted Carnival: State-Sponsored Graffiti in China

Chapter 2: Writing at the End of History: Reflections on Two Cases of Graffiti in Hong Kong

Part II: Aura on (and beyond) the Street—Body, Community, and Media

Chapter 3: Trans-spatial Images: Traveling Graffiti (Art) and the Possibility of Resistance in Chinese Urban Space

Chapter 4: Eloquence of Silent Speech: JR in East Asia

Part III: Dissensus on the Street—Aesthetics, Politics, and Public Space

Chapter 5: The Spectacle of Democracy: Violence, Language, and Dissensus in the Case of Anti-war Graffiti in Tokyo

Chapter 6: The Nation’s Shame? Seoul’s Rat Graffiti Incident at the 2010 G-20 Summit

Part IV: Creativity on the Street—Visual Narratives of East Asian Creative Cities

Chapter 7: Art, Urban Space, and Governance: Street Mural and Legal Wall in Japan

Chapter 8: Marginality as Centrality: The Seoul Urban Art Project and AGIT in Busan

Special Chapter: Voices from the Street—Interviews with Street Visual Producers in East Asia

Interview with VERY

Interview with Garoo

Interview with Zyko (Beijing)

Interview with Ken Lee @Dirty Panda

Interview with Friendly @Invasian

Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who supported me throughout my research. I wish to thank all my dear colleagues I met during our visiting scholarship/fellowship at Harvard-Yenching Institute, where the first idea of writing on graffiti and street art occurred to me, between 2011 and 2012. Special thanks to Tang Hongfeng, Wu Xueshan, Cai Tao, Song Bin, Mariko Naito, Ryoko Kosugi, Wei Bingbing and many others for giving me valuable insights about the topic and for their (harsh) comments. I was also lucky to have the chance to talk with Caleb Neelon, introduced by Dr. Winnie Wong, about graffiti in the US.

Most of the part of the research was funded by HKU SPACE Community College Research Grant and I am highly indebted to my former College Principal Prof. Wong Tak Ming, who gave me detailed and constructive suggestions during the planning and development of this research proposal and supported me throughout.

During my field trips, I was greatly moved by the willingness of many people who spared their time so generously for my interviews. In Japan, VERY, KRESS, Mr. Sakaguchi Yoshiaki (Deputy Manager of Planning Division, City Brand Promotion Office), and Mr. Uchiyama Tetsuya (Deputy Manager of Department of Construction, Culture and Tourism Bureau) from City of Yokohama spared their precious time for my long interviews. In Korea, I was grateful for the sharing of Garoo, Junk House, KAY2, Sixcoin, Kun woo and Cheon Hyeonjin at AGIT about their views on graffiti, street art and independent cultural space. In Hong Kong, my research would not have been complete without the help of Ken Lee @Dirty Panda and Friendly @Invasian. I would also like to thank Norbert Kirbach and Ye Shu (ABS Crew) @400 ml in Beijing.

I would also like to thank those who gave consent to me to include their wonderful images as part of this book: Yong Wang (Chongqing), Cally Yu (Hong Kong), VERY (Osaka), Bomee Song (Seoul), Junseok Seo (Seoul), TJ Choe (Seoul) and Garoo (Seoul).

Last but not least, I am particularly grateful for the assistance given by my two excellent research assistants, Mr. Gentaro Sasaki and Ms. Eunsoo Lee, who have done an excellent job in translation, interpretation and data collection during my research. This project could not have been completed without their help.

Introduction

Berlin—Boston—Hong Kong

Back in spring 2012, I visited Caleb Neelon, one of the authors of The History of American Graffiti, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during my stay at the Harvard Yenching Institute. I was just beginning my article about Chinese street art, a topic that I decided to write about after conducting several years’ worth of research on urban space, memory, and modernity in Shanghai and Berlin. Before our conversation, I had no idea why I was attracted to this topic, which despite my passion for urban space, was entirely different from my previous works.

Neelon was inspired to become a graffitist at 13 years of age when his family visited Berlin in 1990, right after the 30-year division ended. Like other tourists, Neelon saw the Berlin Wall and was impressed by the graffiti, tags, and murals that vandalized the wall. He also recalled his amusing experience in Shenzhen (a southern city bordering Hong Kong), China, in which he was invited by the local government to participate in a mural project of a museum in Dafen Village, known as an international manufacturing center of exported commercial paintings.¹ After seeing mediocre imitations of western masterpieces, low-quality copies of best-selling Chinese artworks, and the streamlined, handcraft workshop-style painting process, Neelon called the village the center of the world’s worst art.

I must say I began to understand why I selected such a topic after our conversation. I have frequently explored the corners of Berlin and have seen the graffiti and murals around the city. Little did I know that these images would accumulate in my subconscious, waiting for the perfect moment at which to be awakened. The experience and perceptions of Neelon toward Dafen Village, and toward China as a whole, reflect the controversial status quo of the street art that I have been seeing, gradually nurturing my interest to explore such artworks because of their inconsistent, contradictory, and chaotic nature.

Issues on graffiti and street art in China recently began to spread throughout the country. In 2011, at least two graffiti images became the center of discussion in both Mainland China and Hong Kong. In April, the stencil graffiti of Ai Weiwei, the most famous dissenting artist in China, began to spread throughout Hong Kong after his arrest in April 2011. Graffiti of Weiwei is not home yet were painted overnight all over my own neighborhood on the eastern side of Kowloon. In July, after the high-speed train crash in southeast China shocked the nation, I spent most of my time reading news on Weibo, a popular Twitter-like social media website in China, and reposting a graffiti image of a blood-stained bullet-head train with the face of a skeleton. This was my reaction to the irresponsible post-accident actions of the government. I could not help but think about these graffiti that became widespread during social crises around me, which eventually inspired me to write my first article on graffiti in China.

My frequent travels around Asia also inspired my curiosity toward Asian graffiti and street art. I learned from my friends in Japan and Korea about the existence and history of Sakuragicho in Yokohama, the AGIT indie art space in Busan, and the Urban Art Project in Seoul. I also participated in the Inside Out Project by JR, a French street artist, when he took his photo booth concept to Hong Kong during his visit in 2012. All these events and the people I met encouraged me to expand my research beyond the Chinese and Hong Kong contexts and to embark on an adventure. This adventure led to the creation of this book, which explores the street visuals of selected cities from three East Asian countries, namely, China, Japan, and South Korea.

Unlike The History of American Graffiti, this book presents more than a purely historical rendition of street visuals in East Asia, which tends to repeat the clichés on the discourse of East Asianness or generalize street art as an outcome of East-West cultural interactions amidst the backdrop of globalization. This book does not only document the material existence, form or style, per se, of these visuals, but also tries to understand the domestic, regional, and global nexus of the selected East Asian cities through their street visuals. The book can be seen as a photo collage of past and present street visuals in East Asian cities, which may or may not affect street visuals in the future. I look for the temporal and spatial traces situated between the corridors of time—the traces that are not too close yet not too far—that may disappear from our daily lives but do not warrant preservation at the present time. This book presents such traces, which are neither regarded as representable nor rememberable.

Main Themes

My discussions on street visual culture are mainly framed by four themes, namely, carnival, publicness, aura, and creative city. This book attempts to unfold the complex positions of these visuals in the urban spatial politics of their respective regions. It does so by providing definitions of what a graffiti producer or spectator is, as well as by addressing what kind of public space visuals are engendered in East Asia. It also explores how graffiti in East Asia reflect the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The book situates itself in a contested dynamic relationship among human bodies, visual modernity, social or moral norms, styles, and historical experiences/narratives. On a broader level, this book aims to shed light on how aesthetics and politics are mobilized in different contested spaces and media forms, in which the producer and the spectator change and exchange their identities.

So far, there has been no academic monograph on street visuals written exclusively about East Asia. However, the importance of this research’s regional focus is more than just filling this gap. On one hand, the highly intriguing modernity and modernization of the region from the early twentieth century makes it a vantage point for extensive, historical discussions on creative practices. On the other hand, as a major (potential) contributor to the global creative industry, East Asia offers an alternative perspective toward the status quo of global creative practices, other than the western world. Given that the East Asian region contains about half of the world’s largest cities measured by population, and five out of the ten fastest growing cities, the fact that the built environments of East Asia have pushed forward the vanguard of a new urbanism is not mere exaggeration because of the emergence of intricately connected networks of mega-cities and metropolises across the region.² The production, shaping, and contestation of urban spaces by multiple intersecting imaginations and interventions of various actors and agencies present an intriguing topic for discussion. Therefore, this book shall use East Asia to observe how the invention and reinvention of urban forms affects creative discourses and practices. It also tries to provoke further discussions about urban regeneration and gentrification, and to redefine the interconnections among art, creativity, and public space/sphere.

Similar to other forms of signs, graffiti and street art have personal and social connotations, reflecting the collective memories of a particular society. In East Asia, these memories include the Japanese colonization of East Asia, the experience of totalitarianism of all three countries, and the unsettled historical disputes on World War II legacies, etc. These societies’ memories about their history are largely shaped by education, media, and other social institutions. Therefore, the process by which these memories shape and are being shaped by graffiti and street visuals, which are external to the abovementioned institutions, presents a valuable topic for discussion. Street visuals may reflect how adjacent yet unfamiliar these societies are to one another. This book may provide a new method for deciphering the anxieties that underlie the present tension and cooperation between these regions against the backdrop of global urbanization.

The cases I will discuss in this work are exceptional in their respective rights. They present an alternative picture of the street visuals in East Asia. However, this exceptionality does not separate the cases from the overall situation of graffiti in the regional context. On the contrary, these cases highlight some of the most subtle and sophisticated moments in the creation of street visuals. Unlike previous studies on graffiti that largely focus on semiotic or sociological analyses, this book combines different methods and theories from an interdisciplinary angle by combining concepts from literary and cultural studies, media studies, ethnography, art history, sociology, and philosophy. Moreover, my research findings are not only the products of philosophical speculations, textual analyses, and archival searches, but also of empirical methods, such as field trips to actual spaces with graffiti and interviews with graffitists, graffiti shop owners, curators, creative professionals, the public, other graffiti scholars, and urban authorities.

Graffiti as a Theoretical Starting Point

I will begin my discussion on street visuals with a fluid definition of graffiti in contemporary cities. Although humans have been scrawling on walls since the Stone Age, the emergence of the modern graffiti could be traced back to several crises in the twentieth century: such as the engraving of Kilroy was here during World War II, which became widespread among US cities and the rest of the world after the war; the general strikes and protests in 1968 Paris that prompted students to paint numerous slogans on walls such as Boredom is counterrevolutionary; and the murals and scribbles on the Berlin Wall after the reunification.

Contemporary graffiti began in New York City during the late 1960s and the early 1970s, a period that was marred by rapid suburbanization, decay of downtown areas, increase in unemployment rates, tension from the cold war, and racial conflicts. As a powerful yet illegitimate way to make themselves visible, a group of anonymous young men who can neither vote nor independently own property began to write meaningless names or doodles in public spaces and in subway trains.³ Among the very first pioneers of city graffiti was TAKI 183, a Greek teenager who immigrated to Manhattan and wrote his signature around the city, such as in subways, streets, and the airport. His followers from all races, religions, and economic classes mostly comprised of teenagers who wrote their own pseudonyms and other inscrutable graphics on a wider scale. The spread of these street visuals throughout the city incited a war between the authorities, such as the Transit Authority, the police, or even the Secret Service, on one hand, and the graffitists who were fighting for an equal order of visuality according to their own definitions, on the other hand. The famous news coverage of New York Times in 1971, which featured an interview with TAKI 183, marked a legendary starting point in the history of graffiti.⁴

Since then, the definition of graffiti has been increasingly contested in the West as different social actors create different discursive spaces for these visuals. As the early forms of graffiti can still be seen in most western cities, their styles have been entrenched in a more specific form with bold color compositions and comic-style graphics. Although these street visuals originally indicated a highly rebellious public action, graffiti are partially well rooted in the western urban subculture and in the realm of popular culture due to their commercialization. As several graffitists, such as Keith Haring, Basquiat, and Banksy, received international recognition, graffiti thus began to enter the world and market of art. The major debates on western graffiti focus on the equivocal nature of the social, artistic, and moral aspects of these visuals. These debates focus on the question of graffiti being seen as a crime, a form of subculture, or a piece of street art. The diverse forms and purposes of graffiti have generated different public perceptions and tolerance levels for these visuals. As an unauthorized violation of private property, graffiti are perceived to be illegal and provocative, which represents as a serious urban problem.

My understanding of graffiti is situated in some basic conceptual hypotheses. The features of graffiti do not only focus on typical terms, such as legality, ontological characteristics (form, material, style), or intention of the graffitist. These features focus on how graffiti, as a visual existence, act as sense-redistributors between the urban environment and the people (i.e., spectators and writers), which in turn, generates highly general aesthetical/political mappings of a particular area. This book will be divided into four parts based on these conceptualizations.

First, graffiti celebrates the carnivalesque humor and disorder that is experienced by people in their daily lives. In a strict sense, graffiti are always accompanied by a certain sense of illicitness that may either pass by unnoticed or disturb the predominant order. Graffitists call themselves writers rather than artists or painters, because they write against all forms that dictate normal content, such as the mass media. As an uninvited system of signs, graffiti are considered as a literarity, or as Jacques Rancière defines the term, an out-of-control excess of words. Graffiti challenge the sign system of a city dominated by advertisements and spectacles; they also inspire unyielding individuals to change a location of indifference and numbness into an electrified space of differences. Jean Baudrillard thinks that these street visuals burst into reality like a scream, an interjection, an anti-discourse, as the waste of all syntactic, poetic and political development, as the smallest radical element that cannot be caught by any organized discourse (1993: 78). This disturbance may originate from the form, content, or in many cases, the spatial presence of these visuals. Baudrillard believes that the ultimate power of graffiti lies in their emptiness. The political nature of graffiti comes along with their aesthetic nature, and the zero-meaning signs enhance the presence of previously repressed subjects. The war between the authorities and the graffitists actually represents the war between different orders of narratives and words that define civility, crime, freedom, and beauty. The effacement of these visuals by the authority reflects the role of graffiti in the restoration of social order. The ephemerality of these visuals also reflects their carnival nature that simultaneously involves both life and death.

Thus, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of carnival, the first part of the book, Carnival on the Street—Visual Order and its (Pseudo-)Reversion, discusses the life and death of graffiti with regard to their living environment, whether post-socialism or capitalism. The seemingly opposite situations in Mainland China and Hong Kong raise the questions, Who can legitimately produce graffiti? and Do the ‘carnivals’ of graffiti actually speak to the carnivalesque nature of these visuals? I begin this part of the book by discussing two state-sponsored graffiti street/wall projects in Beijing and Chongqing, respectively, which I refer to as two twisted carnivals against the backdrop of the continuous modernist agenda of these visuals to catch up and integrate themselves into the global visual order. In the second chapter, I will discuss two controversial cases of graffiti writing in Hong Kong: the graffiti girl incident, which was related to the arrest of Ai Weiwei in 2011; and the story of the King of Kowloon. As the city is at risk of being engulfed by China in terms of the political, social, and cultural spheres, these two seemingly unrelated cases of graffiti jointly speak about the carnivalesque state of Hong Kong that—in the words of Alexandre Kojève—represents the end of history (1969).

The site-specificity of graffiti presents another key feature, which implies that a particular visual occupies a unique topology in time and space. The aura, as Benjamin defined, of graffiti lies in the direct relationship between the human body and the body of the built environment, which excludes any form of media. Unlike a singular piece of painting, graffiti heavily depend on their contextual environment. In other words, graffiti do not use an empty, homogenous piece of texture as a canvas but instead uses the material existence of the city in which they are created. Baudrillard commented that graffitists themselves care little for architecture; they defile it, forget about it and cross the street.⁵ The insensitivity, savageness, and violence that are embodied in the graffiti painted throughout the city structures can also be regarded as a somewhat Benjaminian profane illumination of the space, which refers to the process of coming to the very fore of the city, defacing its structures, and leaving signs as a way of marking a particular time and space—an aura-making process in a city that is seen or designed as a neutralized, homogenized space.⁶ In this sense, graffitists are regarded as flâneurs at large who render both their writing and the city as auratic.

The second part of the book Aura on (and beyond) the Street—Body, Community and Media scrutinizes the moving bodies of graffitists and moving images across different space and media in East Asia. I shall not only discuss how such movements create the aura of the visuals and the spaces, but also explore their cultural and social implications in the East Asian context. I will begin by discussing two cases in China. Artist Zhang Dali, who transformed from a graffitist to a world-famous artist, moves his body as well as his graffiti from the streets of Beijing to the galleries and museums. In Shanghai, a graffiti that criticized the irresponsible behaviors of the Chinese Government after a serious high-speed train crash was painted, removed, and repainted in a famous university. Later, the wide online circulation of the graffiti images further complicated the relations among the image, the graffitist, and the spectators. This part also discusses the case of JR, a French street artist, and his works scattered in different East Asian cities. Although his works can be found all over the world, this part of the book will only focus on the JR’s works situated in East Asia and will perceive the region as a part of a de-territorialized world that shares the most basic human senses of bodies and emotions.

The carnivalesque and site-specific nature of graffiti is closely related to the publicness of these visuals, which concerns the relationship between the producer and the spectator rather than that between the producer and his/her work. Graffitists take advantage of seemingly useless public spaces, such as subspaces (i.e., underpasses) and nonspaces (i.e., fallow lands, ruins, or abandoned structures), to express their creativity. Although some graffitists do not create these visuals as an artistic expression, they expect an audience to see their creations, to acknowledge their existence, or to stop and think differently of daily routines that are often suppressed by a monolithic meaning. Unlike the artworks enshrined in museums, which claim the eternal and divine death of these pieces, graffiti are anti-museum pieces that can be seen anywhere and can be created by anyone. In this sense, graffiti represent the immediate actions—though contingent and arbitrary—of demos rather than their utopian imagination of a society. Therefore, graffiti are made for demos to do and to see. Graffiti may form the idea of public space, based on the Arendtian space of appearance, in which demos gather and take action. However, this publicness does not necessarily or linearly result in a liberated public that is supposed to be enlightened and moved to actions that may direct their society toward the ideal levels of justice and fairness.

Therefore, the third part of this book Dissensus on the Street—Aesthetics, Politics, and Public Space aims to discuss the complications and dilemmas that emerge during the configuration of public places in East Asia. In Tokyo, an unidentified man sprayed anti-war graffiti on the façade of a toilet building in a small public park and provoked heated public debates on surveillance state. In South Korea, a university lecturer painted a Banksy-style rat on the promotional posters of the 2010 G-20 Summit held in Seoul. A cursory glance may suggest that these incidences can be easily attributed to the present conflict of the public with the hegemonic power of the State and the government. However, the meanings of visual power in the East Asian context, the violence graffiti incites, and the transformation of physical materiality into virtual materiality in the Internet-dominated age complicates the extent to which relations among (national) community, democracy and the public are defined. The politics of graffiti may occur in numerous multidirectional constellations, relations, and circulations precisely because of the abovementioned factors.

By revolving around these conceptual features, my discussions on graffiti offer new possibilities that can deal with the relationships of these visuals with their cities, producers, and spectators in a framework that is less restricted by the common definitions of graffiti. Therefore, the topics that are presented in this book are not only limited to graffiti. I also embrace the fluid and porous borders that graffiti has formed with other street visuals. These borders and the controversies that are caused by their ambiguity have turned street visuals into extremely interesting issues that must be addressed in the current discourses on the establishment of creative cities around the world. On one hand, Cameron McAuliffe argues that opportunities arise for graffiti writers to have their graffiti recognized a something of value—as a manifestation of innovation and creative energy further adding that within creative [city] discourses, ‘street art’ has increasingly gained a foothold as a valid and valued medium.⁷ Street visuals are welcomed in the urban regeneration process and are regarded as positive indicators of the presence of creative groups in a particular location.

On the other hand, as the definition of graffiti and street art continues to overlap and diverge, different actors continue to contest the categorizations and legitimacy of these forms of art. Street art/graffiti become highly complex, creative entities that must be considered when facing these diversified definitions and reactions. Moreover, Zukin and Braslow argue that the presence of both graffiti and street art signifies an eventual change in artist-led creative districts as these areas move from being places of artistic production to places of artistic consumption, as artists and other ‘creatives’ are replaced by second wave gentrifiers.⁸

The last part of the book Creativity on the Street—Visual Narratives of East Asian Creative Cities discusses the role of street art and graffiti (both legal and illegal) in the creative city discourses situated in Japan and Korea. The subtle power struggles during the production of urban spaces in East Asia, whether these activities are named as the creation of creative cities or not, will be unveiled by examining the interplay among various actors, including the governments, non-profit organizations (NPOs), police, private real-estate owners, artists, art institutions, and the public. However, I will place these discussions not only in the framework of cultural policy, but also in a larger context of the present formations and memories of these urban spaces.

The book also features a Special Chapter Voices from the Street—Interviews with Street Visual Producers in East Asia. This chapter presents my first-hand interviews with five active graffitists and street artists in the region, namely, VERY, an All-City-King from Osaka and a forerunner in the formation of the Asian writers’ network; Garoo, a key member of the Seoul Urban Art Project and a famous street artist in South Korea; Zyko, a Beijing-based writer from Germany; Ken Lee, the owner of a spray paint retail shop in Hong Kong; and Friendly, the chief editor of Invasian, a Hong Kong-based graffiti and urban culture magazine. The interviews provide a precious historical account of diverse conceptualizations of graffiti and street art from the street visual producers, how East Asian graffitists emerged and formed their community, and how these visual producers imagine the future of street visuals in the region.

The current production of graffiti in East Asia reflects the contestations over visual modernity, which is given different definitions by the State, the writer, the artist, and the public. These actors aim to produce their own sense in the current urban crises in East Asia, including large-scale urban renewal, natural disasters, the destruction of post-industrial cityscapes, the post-revolutionary aphasia as well as the schizophrenia of the visual language amid a rapid capitalistic modernization. Moreover, the western predominance of the global visual order further re-territorializes the domestic perceptions and evaluations toward the contemporary visual productions in East Asian cities. These contests may echo what Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible in any aesthetic moment, which he believes, is simultaneously a political moment. The distribution of the sensible leads to a dissensus. Rancière argues that dissensus is not a conflict between individuals or groups [possessing] different identities, interests, opinions, or values, but rather a conflict between one sensible order and another.⁹ The book is largely based on Rancière’s deliberations on politics and aesthetics, though each part follows a theoretical main thread of theories such as those from Bakhtin (carnival), Kojève (end of history), Benjamin (aura and distraction), and de Certeau (tactics). These ideas coalesce into Rancière’s thoughts and evoke new conceptual encounters and