Secret Walls has street artists battle it out
A contest that pits two street artists against each other in a fight club atmosphere has swept the world and is now drawing in local crowds
It's Monday evening, but it feels like Friday night. Nearly 200 people crowd into The Dairy, the Fringe Club's basement nightclub. The music is loud, mostly dubstep with a local MC rapping over the beat. For those close to Hong Kong's burgeoning street art scene, there are a lot of familiar faces in the crowd: graffiti artists, designers, DJs and MCs. And as people get drinks and mingle, their eyes keep glancing at the gleaming edifice onstage, two shining stark white walls.
This is Secret Walls, a global street art phenomenon that in the past two years has taken hold in Hong Kong. Secret Walls started in 2005 at a bar in East London as a way to bring the ethos of rap battling to street art.
Held in front of an often rowdy live audience, two artists are given 90 minutes and the use of a black felt tip marker and black acrylic paint to create a full mural on a white wall measuring 2.4 metres square. As in a rap battle, they are encouraged to take jabs at each other in their work and interact with each other in real time through their drawing. When the time is up, two guest judges choose a winner. In the case of a tie, the crowd decides - whichever artist they cheer louder for, measured by a noise meter, is declared the winner.
Monday's session was this year's grand finale, the culmination of seven preliminaries. Facing off on the stage were two Englishmen - Szabotage (Gustav Szabo, an architect and interior designer from Brighton) and Used Pencil (Ben Pickering, a special needs teacher from Kendal, Cumbria).
Secret Walls' presence in Hong Kong is largely the work of Sarah Ouellette, the founder of marketing agency Brand Tribe Asia. The Canadian says she often attended Secret Walls events in Sydney and Melbourne when living in Australia, and found them "really good fun".