All Hail the King of Kowloon! Mediating Malleable Materiality

In Chapter 3, Tsang Tsou-choi—named “one of the oldest graffiti artists in the world” by the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003—comes into the picture. As a self-proclaimed “king” since the 1950s, Tsang spent decades writing his family’s “(hi)stories” on different surfaces in the streets of Hong Kong, ranging from walls, lampposts and post boxes to electricity boxes. Alongside the writings he produced and the places he reinvented in the city, the connection Tsang made with the local territory and local history is examined in this chapter as a confluence of local relations which reverberate and fluctuate on their own according to different footprints and traces Tsang left in the city and in the mind of his fellow urban dwellers.