I am back in New York for the next month starting my MFA Art Practice program at the School of Visual Arts, so excuse my delays in posting new material. After shooting Han Han for the New Yorker I was able to escape to Changsha to witness the Meeting of Styles graffiti gathering. Over a hundred graffiti artists from all over China congregated in the city that once witnessed Mao Zedong’s conversion to communism. Street art in China is still in a very nascent stage, so I was greatly impressed by the wide variety of styles on display smack in the middle of Changsha’s waterfront. Quite frankly I was a bit surprised the local powers that be even approved a graffiti event of this scale in the first place. The artwork ran for hundreds of meters, stretching out from either side of the Xiangjiang River No.1 Bridge – a major transportation artery in Hunan’s capital. The video below walks you through the core of the murals created during the Meeting of Styles. I met a ton of really interesting graffiti artists while in Changsha who I will be following up with individually across China.
