About this Series
2 episodes in total. (Duration: 10-12 minutes per episode)
Between 2013 and 2015, graffiti art had urged me to visit many countries such as Brazil, China, Myanmar, and South Korea. During that period, I jotted down several travel notes in an irregular manner that bore testimony to this piece of “graffiti history.” Later, I collated these notes to yield several articles that still cannot be considered a perfectly coherent travel record as a whole. I will recite three of them (incl. Prologue, Beijing, and Myanmar) in the radio program Travel Notes: Fangcaodi Alley. The title “Fangcaodi Alley” owed its inspiration to the name of an ally in Beijing. One day in 2013, I planned to go there but got lost without knowing why, and I couldn’t find that alley anymore (Now it seems to be renamed as Fangcaodi North Alley, Fangcaodi West Alley, and so on). I use this experience as a metaphor for my search for some elusive, lost spirits.
Candy Bird
Starting
his career as an artist with graffiti, Candy Bird’s oeuvre revolves around the
issues concerning urban society and marginality. In 2010, he began to convey non-mainstream
views and his observations as a participant in resistance movements with
graffiti, so as to serve his cause of creating art for the society in urban
cracks. His sui generis technique features a delightful blend of existing
objects and historical contexts. In recent years, Candy Bird has engaged in the
interdisciplinary collaboration with amateur literature, experimenting with new
transformation and fusion of subjects in the creative process, insofar as to break
the monotony of conventional graffiti and street murals as well as prompt the
viewers to pay attention to others’ traces of life with which the former’s
sympathy lies.