Yok, Sheryo and Beastman from The Hours
The Hours is a group of Australian street artists who travel the world to work on collaborative murals and group exhibitions. They’re in town for their “Neon Golden” exhibition. Yok, Sheryo and Beastman (L-R) are three of the collective. They sat down with Kelly Cheuk Ying Ho to talk about their artwork, their inspiration and their collaborations.
HK Magazine: What inspired you guys to take up street art?
Beastman: I just wanted to paint my artwork big, because it looks much more interesting than if it were on a small canvas. By painting the artwork in a public space, you’re essentially giving your artwork away to the public—for free—so more people can be exposed to your work.
Sheryo: It’s fun, too, because you get to interact with people on the streets while you’re painting.
Yok: Street art is definitely more fun than working solo in the studios. If you’re just doing studio work, it’s such a limited way to get it out there. But if you paint a big wall, you’d reach people you would never ever imagine you could reach.
HK: How different is it to paint on the streets versus on typical canvases?
Y: You have to deal with so many different elements. Like weather: the last two days it’s been pouring rain. You have mosquitoes, police, all kinds of different factors.
B: The quality of the environment you’re painting in definitely influences the work you create. If you’re painting a wall, it might have a window in it, it might have a door, or a big pipe going through it. So those aspects of location really influence the work. You have to work with the surface you’re painting on.
HK: Sheryo and Yok—why paint on blue and white porcelain?
Y: Traditionally, in China, they have used those vases to paint fables and folklore, and they have messages about how the village lived, things like that. So we took that and painted our travels and adventures in New York City. On our porcelain work you can find hot dogs, pizzas and Vietnamese influences, since we painted the porcelain there. We thought it’d be a nice way to juxtapose something contemporary, like the flash art style we’ve been doing, and put it in such a traditional media. We’re bringing a new style to an ancient technique.
HK: Does anything you’ve seen so far in Hong Kong inspire you?
S: Hong Kong makes me want to explore more with different textures. Here, you can see old, gray buildings with paint chips flaking off, which don’t look very clean to live in. Then you have jungles growing out the sides of walls and tree roots coming out of concrete… it’s awesome.