Taking art and words to the streets
It may be illegal in Hong Kong, but that does not mean you cannot publicly express your emotions with art on a wall - you just need to go to one of several venues that actually encourage graffiti.
It's still possible to see the work of illegal graffiti artists in Hong Kong - some of them created by collectives - but police crackdowns in recent years have driven most of them to relocate to Shenzhen, where punishment for 'vandalism' is less strictly enforced.
A widely misunderstood art form, graffiti has a long history, and over the past few decades it has been nudging its way into the mainstream, with high-recognition brand names such as Nike and Diesel hiring graffiti artists to design their products and contribute to advertising campaigns.
Graffiti is simply an image created in any public space. There are no formal rules or tools, and the art doesn't require canvases or a lot of money, allowing virtually anyone to create a beautiful piece of art for a wide audience.
Although in many people's minds, it is simply a form of vandalism, historically graffiti helped spread ideas long before the invention of commercial printing. In ancient Greece and Rome, people wrote stories and poems on public walls.
More recently, in the 1920s, a student is said to have written a 4,000-word graffiti on the walls of a university toilet in Changsha , Hunnan province , criticising his school, teachers and Chinese society. The student's name? Mao Zedong - the man who launched a revolution, and founded modern China.
Graffiti artists use 'tags' - stylised signatures - to identify their work, which became big in New York in the early 1970s.
Tags are rather like nicknames the artists have invented for themselves.
There are several designated graffiti walls in Hong Kong for you to legally practise your spray painting skills.
