THERE'S A RENEGADE running amok across town. Lurking under flyovers or in dark alleys, he's pointing guns, spray cans or his middle finger at either himself or passers-by. He's seen practising kung fu outside the World Trade Centre in Causeway Bay, and squatting alongside bills offering a wide variety of products (bedsits, battered cars, escorts) in a dimly lit passageway off Nathan Road in Yau Ma Tei.
The individual launching this one-man urban guerilla movement calls himself Naughty Monkey, and he's very much a two-dimensional guy. For the gun-toting, Bruce Lee-aping prankster is a stencilled image sprayed on walls by someone dexterous enough to evade the law.
As most of the 'monkeys' - that are actually images of a young, face-painted man - appear in backstreets, few know much about them. People who frequent the site where the first image appeared in May - on a wall next to a small park on Pottinger Street, Central, and, remarkably, just metres from the Central police station - were subtly amused by it, although no one seemed particularly worked up by its presence. There's been little reaction from local stallholders and residents - remarkable considering the monkey is pointing a gun in his mouth. Six months on, the image is still there.
'Hong Kong is quite conservative and it seems like the naughty element is missing - and [the monkey's] not political and not meant to damage property, but to show the naughty spirit is still there in these places,' says Simon Birch, a British-born, Hong Kong-based painter-cum-DJ. 'As far as I understand, it's free art for the public.'
The appearance of Naughty Monkey is the latest twist in the development of graffiti art in Hong Kong. The sale of an art piece featuring the ink-calligraphy-on-walls by Tsang Tsou-choi, the 83-year-old self-styled 'King of Kowloon', who makes 'royal proclamations' about his sovereignty over vast tracts of land in Hong Kong, was seen as major acknowledgment for a form of street culture long derided as merely defacement of public property. The gradual increase in tolerance - if not approval - towards hip-hop and supplementary modes of expression such as graffiti has also made subcultural stars out of the likes of MC Yan, Hong Kong's most vocal advocate and practitioner of hip-hop and street culture. The anarchist aura surrounding Naughty Monkey, however, stands to push local graffiti art to a new level.
Birch, 35, says he 'knows' the person behind Naughty Monkey and that he only speaks on behalf of the graffiti artist behind the images. While talking of these images with much enthusiasm, he is careful to add in turns of phrases to distance himself from the work. So, his explanations of Naughty Monkey are peppered with caveats such as 'I think' and 'I guess', and the wall-sprayer is endlessly referred as 'the artist'.
