When Wang Hanzheng, a Chinese student at the Royal College of Art, attended a graduate show in a warehouse on Brick Lane in east London in July, he found the space crowded, unimaginative and unfit for presenting art. It was with this in mind that at 11pm one night earlier this month Wang and a team of 22 others painted a Chinese political slogan in bold red characters along a nearby wall stretching nearly 100 metres. The artwork – which spelled out the Chinese government’s “socialist core values”, including the…
Tag: Street art
Chinese political slogans spark graffiti free-for-all on east London wall
It began with a group of artists and a propaganda slogan: 24 Chinese characters painted in bold red, stretching nearly 100 metres along Brick Lane in London’s East End. But over the weekend, the Chinese government slogan promoting – ironically or not – the country’s “socialist core values” was swiftly transformed into a forum scrutinising Xi Jinping’s communist rule after garnering attention on social media. Within hours of appearing on Saturday, the slogan was overlaid with references to the bloody Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and phrases: “Free Taiwan”, “Free…