Google provides online home for King of Kowloon's calligraphy

Works by iconic Hong Kong artist "King of Kowloon" Tsang Tsou-choi are finding a permanent home online, as most of the physical pieces have disappeared from their original spaces on the streets after little was done to preserve them.

Around 170 works by Tsang - known for his tightly packed ink calligraphy painted on walls, electricity boxes and pillars around the city - have been documented and curated in an online project by the Google Cultural Institute in collaboration with the Art Research Institute.

Tsang is the first Hong Kong artist to be featured on Google's online cultural platform, which has collaborated with more than 700 partners to showcase more than 6.4 million items of artistic and cultural significance.

"There is an urgency in preserving Tsang Tsou-choi's work, especially because most of it has disappeared from the streets," said Dominic Allon, managing director of Google Hong Kong. "The transient nature of street art means it can be at risk of being scrubbed out and lost forever."

By photographing the works and displaying them in a curated online platform - sometimes with Google map locations attached - they would be saved for many generations of Hongkongers to come, Allon said.

Tsang completed over 55,000 works, mostly outdoors in public areas. However, most have been erased or painted over, even though the artist received international recognition in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The artist passed away in 2007.

Art critic Lau Kin-wai said numerous pleas had been made to the government to preserve Tsang's works. Only one is being preserved at the moment - on a pillar outside the Star Ferry pier in Tsim Sha Tsui.