José Pando Lucas/Courtesy HOCA Foundation/Bruno Lopes
Portuguese street artist Vhils has taken over a Hong Kong streets and rooftops to display his 'Debris' exhibition.
José Pando Lucas/Courtesy HOCA Foundation/Bruno Lopes
All the works are based on portraits of anonymous Hong Kong citizens that Vhils has sketched or photographed and combined together to create a new visage.
Bruno Lopes / Courtesy of HOCA Foundation
The exhibition explores Vhils' love-hate relationship with Hong Kong's metropolis.
Bruno Lopes / Courtesy of HOCA Foundation
'Debris' features work made of neon lights, acid and styrofoam.
courtesy vhils
Vhils' first major Hong Kong piece was a portrait of a factory worker drilled into the facade of Mills6, a former cotton mill turned creative complex in Tsuen Wan. The giant face was an unexpected addition to the neighborhood, which is filled with hulking factories and concrete housing estates. "The intention was to bring the history of the place back by breaking the wall and making the invisible visible to expose the inside of the building with people that were working in the factory for so long," says Vhils.
courtesy vhils
A second portrait based on a photograph of a Hong Kong factory worker at a former cotton mill in the industrial neighborhood of Tsuen Wan.
SforShot/Silvia Lopes/courtesy vhils
Vhils carving his art into a wall. "It's part of the creation process to destroy the things before us, even if we aren't conscious about it," says Vhils. "There is a lot of new that you can bring but there is also a lot that can be lost if you don't do it in the right way."
courtesy vhils
The cacophony of advertisements plastered across Hong Kong was rich fodder for the artist. This is one of his works created last year on Hillier Street, Sheung Wan, a neighborhood close to the Central business district. It's since been plastered over. Alongside his works on the streets, Vhils' art appears at auction. This month, his works are part of a private sale at Sotheby's Hong Kong Gallery.
courtesy vhils
Vhils carved this striking image into a billboard on Hysan Avenue in Causeway Bay, a crowded Hong Kong commercial district, last year. The wall was quickly covered over by a fresh layer of advertisements, reflecting the fast pace of the city.
courtesy vhils
A work in progress, titled 'Glimpse,' in Vhils' studio in the Hong Kong industrial neighborhood of Aberdeen. The Debris exhibition marks his first experiments with neon lights, a material he has associated with the city since watching Wong Kar-wai films as a teenager. "Those who see it everyday don't recognize it's such a beautiful [medium] and taken to such an extreme in Hong Kong," says Farto.
Vhils worked with local neon masters to produce these new works, which appear at the "Debris" exhibition.
courtesy vhils
Vhils plastered a moving tram, a century-old form of transport in Hong Kong, with his signature work. The portraits on the facade are based on anonymous residents of the city.
courtesy vhils
An etched metal plate being cut for a larger work, which will be shown for the first time at Debris.
courtesy vhils
"The idea is to empower everyday heroes that usually don't get recognition," say Farto of his portraiture.
courtesy vhils
Vhils composes a piece of art using metal plates with images of commercial street signs, buildings and text gathered from around Hong Kong. By juxtaposing these images with portraits he points to the way in which the environment of a city impacts and shapes its inhabitants.
courtesy vhils
A work that will feature in the Debris exhibition, made of ink and bleach screen printed onto paper. Vhils took inspiration from Hong Kong residents for the show. "Sometimes I asked for portraits or pictures but sometimes people wouldn't realize [I was making sketches]," says Vhils. "It's my process. It's how I try to get a glimpse of what I can capture from the routine of everyday."
courtesy vhils
An etched metal plate being washed after an acid bath.
courtesy vhils
A sprawling diorama similar to this work will be on display at Debris. Based on an aerial view of Hong Kong, viewers will be able to make out portraits carved into the undulating building tops.
courtesy vhils
Vhils and his studio manager checking silkscreen prints at a factory in Hong Kong ahead of his exhibition Debris.
courtesy vhils
The test structure for an enclosed frame that will display Vhils' work on the rooftop of a ferry pier in Hong Kong. The artist plans to create a tunnel featuring a video installation and a series of rooms in which other artwork will be displayed.
courtesy vhils
Street artist Vhils in his Lisbon studio preparing for his first Hong Kong solo exhibition, titled Debris. The citywide show includes interventions on public walls and a moving tram, and an installation on the rooftop of a ferry pier.

Story highlights

Portuguese street artist "Vhils" is known for drilling giant faces into building facades

A residency in Hong Kong has seen him turn the city's walls and tram into works of art

He has now opened his first Hong Kong solo show, with plans to take the exhibition global

Hong Kong CNN  — 

Whether it’s blowing up a building façade in Berlin to reveal a carving of a man’s face or drilling portraits into favela walls in Rio de Janeiro, raucous street artist Alexandre Farto, who goes by the tag “Vhils,” has left an imprint on urban landscapes across the globe.

Hong Kong’s tunnels and trams have been his most recent canvas and the result has just been unveiled in “Debris,” the artist’s first solo exhibition in the city, featured at sites across the Central financial district.

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Up late with Vhils

“It’s stimulating for me to try do things here because it’s not so expected,” 29-year-old Vhils says of the flashy, fast-paced commercial hub of Hong Kong. “This is my longest project in a city besides the one where I was born.”

Urban faces

Timed to coincide with Art Basel Hong Kong 2016, “Debris” explores Vhils’ love-hate relationship with Hong Kong’s metropolis. It’s a place he’s called home since last August, after the Hong Kong Contemporary Art (HOCA) Foundation invited him to do an artist residency.

The privately financed group, which hosts shows for international street artists, have also funded the large-scale exhibition.

Using the breakneck speed of Hong Kong and its inhabitants as inspiration, Vhils and his team have been transforming the city’s urban landscape, cutting portraits into public walls and carving into advertisements he plastered onto one of the city’s much-loved functioning trams.

All the works are based on portraits of anonymous Hong Kong citizens that Vhils has sketched or photographed and combined together to create a new visage.

“Usually the faces are juxtaposed with elements from the city, which are a reflection on our identity, expectations of life or what we want to achieve,” he says. “Even our dreams are given by information in the public space.”

A tunnel on the roof of a ferry pier in the heart of the financial district, forms the spine of the exhibition, with nine rooms leading into different bodies of work, including his first experiments with neon.

Altogether, the exhibition will feature more than 20 works of art, including a video installation and etched metal works.

“I’m trying to make people go inside and stop to look at beauty of everyday life that we pass by but don’t realize,” he says.

One of the world’s fattest cities

As evidenced by the vibrant papers strewn across his studio in Aberdeen, an aptly industrial part of Hong Kong Island, billboard posters are a key material for Vhils.

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“They are like fossils that you can archeologically excavate to explore the chaotic overlaying [of information] that happens in a city,” explains the artist.

Raised in a working-class neighborhood in an industrial suburb near Lisbon, Vhils first started doing illegal graffiti and “train bombing” – at the age of 13.

He began carving art into billboard posters around age 16 and remembers observing old political murals created after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, the peaceful coup in 1974 that ended Europe’s longest dictatorship. 

“They were forgotten—fading away in the sun and crumbling,” he recalls. “On the other hand you had huge billboards coming up so it was two completely different systems using the public space that were confronting each other. Eventually the billboards went on top of the murals.”

Courtesy Thames & Hudson, © Alexander Silva
Vhils carved this mural into the side of a building in Lisbon in 2014.

Vhils saw this as a metaphor for how the once idealistic dreams of the country’s future were replaced by consumerist desire.

“It was almost like the city was getting fatter by a few centimeters and this was reflecting changes in the whole country,” he says of the build-up of advertisements. “When I started to travel I realized in each city the walls absorb similar changes.”

Now world famous for the spectacular giant portraits he carves into the sides of buildings and billboard advertising, he describes Hong Kong as one of the “fattest” cities he has worked in.

“The fast pace that happens in the city also appears on the walls,” he says, noting that six works of art he has created on billboards have already disappeared under fresh layers of advertising, a reflection of the city’s rampant consumerism.

Neon inspiration

Vhils said he has dreamed about Hong Kong since he was a teenager: “I was always close to cinema and Wong Kar-wai – his first movies, the presence of neons, the image that you create of Hong Kong because it was my way of traveling there.”

Now that he’s arrived, the city still looms large in his imagination, and he hopes to showcase the incredible new output it has spawned across other parts of Asia, Europe and the United States.

Although his residency was due to end in March 2016, Vhils said he has become so inspired by the city that he plans to stay, while also maintaining his studio in Lisbon.

“I’m really happy here,” he says. “With all that I hate and love in the city…it allowed me to evolve my work.”

Vhils’ multi-site exhibition “Debris,” runs from March 21 to April 4, 2016. Other works, including the tram, will be cropping up across the city throughout the month of March.