37 years old, artist and freedom fighter

MC Yan is one of Hong Kong’s hidden heroes. He’s a freedom fighter, a cultural activist, and arguably one of the city’s most inspired conceptual artists.

Far from the world of art galleries, MC Yan uses the very fabric of Hong Kong culture to create his masterpieces. He became known as the lyricist for the hugely influential Hong Kong hip-hop outfit LMF (Lazy Mutha Fucka), one of the first underground groups to truly shake mainstream Hong Kong in the early nineties. LMF finally disbanded in 2003, but Yan has continued to innovate at a dizzying speed – pioneering the graffiti scene, launching an internet radio station, spray painting the Great Wall of China, playing musical support for Long Hair at the pro-democracy legislator’s rallies, and regularly conducting workshops about social issues and street culture with university students across the city.

In the flesh he looks like a Taoist scholar, complete with goatee, long hair, and a wild look in his eyes. As an artist he merges ancient Chinese thought with the media of the future. How does he feel about being a Hong Kong hero? “That’s means I’m a fighter,” he says. “I always try to associate my works to this direction, fighting for something, and at the moment my fight is for freedom. I have to figure out if the idea of freedom really suits the Chinese. Now China is opening its door, so all the big thinking should come, we should reflect on what freedom means.”

This notion of freedom is visible in MC Yan’s artwork. Born and raised in the housing estates of Kwai Chung, by the age of 18 he had saved enough money to fly to France, eventually making his way to study art at Paris’ Ecole des Beaux Arts. Returning to the city in the early nineties, Yan made waves with his unusual graffiti, based on the ancient system of Chinese acupuncture. He translated the city into a body and mapped out his plan of where to tag according to the meridian energy lines he imagined for it (www.chinamantaggin.org). He was also famously one of the first high profile graffiti artists to tag the Great Wall of China, and when the rest of Hong Kong caught on to graffiti, Yan went one step further, taking on laser tag technology. In the past year he has written enormous messages in light on to the walls of the Cultural Centre (from across the harbour), and City Hall.

Yan is also an artist who straddles different media – in the past year he has launched a ‘pirate’ radio station called Radio DaDa (www.radiodada.hk), housed in what looks like an astronaut helmet in the basement of Mong Kok’s Langham Place. “In Hong Kong it’s impossible to do an indie radio show, it’s illegal, so we’re starting it in a guerrilla way,” he says. He also releases music with his label Fu Kin Music – but instead of distributing his music via CDs, he stores his tunes on memory sticks, and gets them sewn into the T-shirts he sells via his fashion line, Ning Si Bu Qu (www.nsbq.org).

So what does Hong Kong mean to MC Yan? “It’s a white sheet of paper. You can write whatever you want on to its history. Hong Kong is a freedom city, for now it’s mainly the free trade – but we should use this freedom and share it with other Chinese cities.”

And what does he think of the current art and music scenes in Hong Kong? “It’s not healthy enough,” he argues. “A lot of people are confused. Should artists do commercial activities? I say yes, the more they make, the more they can put back into charity, into the culture itself. We cannot practise like Taoists in the mountains.” Clare Morin