Financial Times
‘The King of Kowloon’
For decades, Tsang Tsou Choi — shirtless, a towel around his neck, supported by crutches — roamed the streets of Hong Kong armed with bottles of black ink and a calligraphy brush. From the 1950s to the 2000s, he turned everything from lampposts to phoneboxes into rippling vistas of Chinese characters. His scuzzy, calligraphic graffiti had a hit-and-run quality; as soon as they were painted over by the city’s sanitation department, he would return to rewrite them. What did Tsang’s messages, filled with outlandish stories of a lost emperor, mean?