Bourree Lam meets the controversial French artist with more than $6 million on his head

Zevs needs no introduction in Hong Kong. The French street artist was arrested by police on July 13 after he was caught “liquidating” a Chanel logo on the side of the Giorgio Armani store at Chater House. The drama intensified when Armani demanded $6.7 million for the replacement of the wall façade, and a media frenzy promptly followed. Within hours, the once anonymous artist’s real name had been added to his Wikipedia entry.

In person, Zevs is low key and softly spoken. His name, pronounced Zeus, originates from one of his first works and is represented by a clover-shaped cloud with a lightning bolt that cleverly incorporates all the letters of his moniker. He may be embroiled in legal and media drama but at Art Statements Gallery, where he is currently showing, he is using syringes to drip paint onto Louis Vuitton logos with meticulous attention.

“I use the logos in my work for their force – graphic force and symbolic force,” he explains. “I like dripping. It transforms it and changes the sense of the logos.”

Zevs has been engaged in liquidating – a self-coined term – the logos of big brands since 2005, the first target being a Nike swoosh logo in Berlin. “I worked a lot in the public space, the streets – I use what I find in the streets, what is already here.”

Fashion’s big names were not the first victims in his quest to raise awareness of the commercial presence in urban public spaces. Before he started targeting logos, Zevs aimed his “visual attacks” at models. Nearly ten years ago, he ‘shot’ supermodels with dripping red paint. A long-term project called Visual Kidnapping followed, in which he cut the image of a model from a Lavazza coffee billboard in Berlin and demanded the company make a donation to a Parisian gallery for her return.

“It was an interesting project to develop, and a long project because it took three years,” reflects the artist. “This corporate image is looking for the marketing target, asking them to look, to consume and buy the product. I aimed to reverse the things, to kidnap their image and ask them to pay for supporting art. It was to play with that in a creative way.”

And it worked. Lavazza paid €500,000 ($5.5 million) before appropriating Zevs’ tactic for the brand’s advertising. Perhaps, when the dust has settled, Armani might seek to collaborate with him too. Like it or not, Zevs’ art gets people on both sides talking, and the ‘kidnapping’ stunt makes him a liberator of sorts, challenging the consumerist imagery that surrounds us. “To me, it’s a surface of the city, a force. This is the position of advertisement in the city. They have this huge force … I work in the public space so I use it and I turn it into art.”

In Hong Kong, Zevs chose to pit two titans against each other. “I played with that,” he says smiling. “To introduce the Chanel logo liquidated in the space of Armani, it’s a kind of friction of branding.”

In the aftermath, Zevs is waiting to clear his name. He says his paints are water based, the logo was a sticker and he knows how to clean it up – if given the chance. In a city as money-driven as Hong Kong, his message is more than a little threatening. Yet his credo is one of hope; this artist who wants to find a place where art, architecture and branding can co-exist.

One thing’s for sure, he’s got all our attention. And he was only up that ladder for ten minutes.

Art Statements Gallery, 5 Mee Lun St, Central, 2122 9657.