‘King of Kowloon’ graffiti artist Tsang Tsou-choi’s calligraphy is uncovered, restored and on display again in Hong Kong
- MTR Corporation commissioned specialists to uncover and restore work painted on rail viaduct in Mong Kok
- Artist painted over same spot again and again, making it difficult for experts to determine which layers of character to preserve
On a nondescript wall under a viaduct near Boundary Street in Mong Kok are patches of what appear to be jumbled-up Chinese calligraphy in various shades of grey and black.
Once regarded as vandalism, the graffiti which was recovered in 2022 after having been painted over for more than a decade is now one of the largest examples of original work by Hong Kong artist and self-styled “King of Kowloon” Tsang Tsou-choi, who died in 2007.
A patch of calligraphy was first revealed at the rail viaduct as paint peeled off. Informed about it, the MTR Corporation commissioned specialists to uncover and restore what lay beneath.
They finished last month, revealing a 1.5 metre-by-five metre (five foot-by-16 foot) piece of calligraphic art showing his trademark style of bold Chinese characters of different sizes, reading from top down and left to right.
Tsang’s works on different media, such as paper, cloth, and even a pair of doors, are now in the collection of Hong Kong’s visual culture museum M+ and have been sold at top auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s fetching as much as HK$500,000 in 2009.
Born in 1921 in mainland China, he arrived in Hong Kong at 16 and made the city’s walls, pillars, postboxes, electricity junction boxes and lamp posts his canvas between the mid-1950s and early 2000s with brushes, bottled ink, and sometimes paint.
