Graffiti works win a wider audience

Trip to Germany

Street artists are becoming more connected with their colleagues elsewhere in the world.

In February last year, Ye and his team helped organize the JOYBO Street Art Festival in Chongqing. The winning team was rewarded with a 12-day graffiti trip to Germany in March last year.

Nine Chinese artists traveled to Germany, where they took part in the Berlin Mural Fest and painted a 50-m-long, 5-m-high mural together with local street artists.

In February, Chen, from Jiaxing, joined the POW!WOW! Festival in Hawaii, a weeklong event that included gallery shows, lectures, schools for art and music, and mural projects. He spent two days painting a Chinese god of longevity at the festival.

The event was held during Spring Festival, so Chen wanted his work to express "best wishes" by blending traditional Chinese culture with a modern art form.

In Hong Kong, the influential street art festival HKWalls is staged every year in March and attracts many local and international artists to create graffiti on street walls. There are also pop-up exhibitions and workshops.

In Shanghai, Yu Yanyan, a graffiti artist and co-founder of the CAPITALL-Shanghai Graffiti Shop, set up an Instagram account in 2017, on which she exhibits interesting street art works by Chinese artists.

In January, her shop co-hosted an international graffiti sketch exhibition, presenting more than 300 works from 77 artists from around the world.

Yu said more graffiti events and festivals are being held in China. "I have a friend who collects posters of graffiti events in China. Last year, he collected more than 200," she said.

Her shop is working with the local neighborhood committee on the possibility of staging an international public art event.

Yu hopes more people will accept street art and see it as a part of their neighborhood.

She was once invited to create works in Queretaro, Mexico. "People in the neighborhood were so nice to us that they brought us water and snacks. It felt as if we were a community together," she said.