Last May, a group of German graffiti artists came to Shanghai as part
of the Expo China 2010 celebration. Akim Walta, the project
coordinator, Jens Muller and four other artists comprised this talented
assembly known as Hip Hop Stutzpunk.
Their goal was the
completion of an urban art project for Expo’s German Pavilion in which
they artfully sprayed the walls of Nongtang in Huachi Road, a
traditional Shanghai neighborhood. The 60-year-old section of town is
actually a lane full of vegetable peddlers and outdoor tailors, but now
it is now decorated with western-style graffiti.
These are not the random scribblings that the word graffiti often
implies; they are rather, works of art as indicated below in this
graffiti of a child taking a bath in an old tin tub painted on the wall
of her house.
“One day, I passed Huachi Road and that’s where I got my first
impression of a local Chinese neighborhood far away from the
skyscrapers. I had the idea to paint something in such a place… It was a
gift to the locals… They invited me for lunch to say ‘thank you’. It
was great to see them happy,” says artist, Jens Muller aka Tasso.
The Hip Hop Stützpunk
has dome many good things for the people of Shanghai. They sponsor many
side events and workshop programs to support real sustainability and
have formed non-profit partnerships with two dance schools, several
music clubs, a Shanghai graffiti school and an artist and magazine
collective that sponsors Asia’s largest graffiti contest.
The locals are delighted with the new adornments on the walls of their once drab and uninteresting streets.
“I
would say the young people really appreciate this new art form and even
the older people in China are much more open than in our country,”
Walta told the press.
The Hip Hop Stützpunk (HHS) is a
privately financed artistic and cultural youth program in Berlin that in
2008 initiated network development in China with the goal of the two
nations coming together. Founder Akim Walta’s ultimate goal is to
present Hip Hop culture as a positive and creative global movement.
Graffiti
has been controversial since it first appeared in the late 1960s in New
York City, but in all fairness, HHS has created something much more
refined and far more artistic than the original expressions of the word.
Taken from: Weird Asia News