“You turn on the news and everything is negative,” he says. “When I draw these positive things on the street, it’s kind of like a public service, a personal mission or my love letter to the city.
“At the end of the day, painting these things makes me happy, even before anyone else sees them and shares the positive vibes.”
The unassuming philosophy of finding simple joys in life rather unexpectedly developed into the practice of painting on naked women and photographing them in erotic poses.
82-year-old life model on posing naked in front of strangers
82-year-old life model on posing naked in front of strangers
“I started focusing more on my artistic practice and I thought, ‘Why can’t I also paint on the human skin as a medium?’ It’s nothing new. Artists around the world have been doing it for a very long time. Why not? The fun element is really important to me.”
In 2020, Lousy published Yook, meaning “meat” in Cantonese, a photographic collection of his body-painting work on 10 female models.
“The female body inspires me, a straight man, as an aesthetically pleasing subject matter. It’s very primal, and it’s something that I like to play with,” he says.
The self-proclaimed “vulgar poet” Matsushimaon also started with graffiti, though the marks he has left on walls are far less family-friendly than Lousy’s “kissface”.
“As a kid, I used to steal my dad’s newspapers to look at the ‘wind and moon’ column, the content of which has influenced my work,” he says, referring to the “adult column” in some local Chinese-language newspapers in Hong Kong that centred on racy images, pornographic topics and dirty jokes – a now-diminished feature since the popularisation of the internet.
Taking inspiration from those columns, Matsushimaon plays on Cantonese slang and expressions. His “vulgar poetry” is often in the form of Chinese couplets, in which both lines usually rhyme and have corresponding or related meanings.
His graffiti can be found in various corners around Hong Kong, and though his Instagram page has been set to private in recent years, it still counts more than 42,000 followers.
I was exposed to Japanese AV when I was 13 or 14 years old, and have been deeply drawn to it since then
Those familiar with JAV (Japanese adult video) culture would perhaps know where his alias came from.
Kaede Matsushima is a former Japanese adult film actress who debuted in 2002. Known as one of the most successful adult film stars, she was a household name in East Asia among sexually frustrated teenage boys who found sexual awakening through unmonitored internet access in the 2000s.
“My first AV idol was Kaede Matsushima – I suppose it’s the same for many men [of my generation],” Matsushimaon admits. “I was exposed to Japanese AV when I was 13 or 14 years old, and have been deeply drawn to it since then. My work is inspired by everything JAV, from the positions and the moans to the set lighting.”
Matsushimaon started marking his cheeky couplets in the streets of Hong Kong in 2018 and had his first solo exhibition, whose title translated as “losing virginity”, in 2021. The exhibition was aptly held on Kowloon’s Portland Street, one of the city’s most well-known red-light districts.
Despite its nature, Matsushimaon’s work has no shortage of female fans.
“I was surprised that there were more female than male visitors to the exhibition. Maybe my work can help women express certain things they’ve been wanting to say for a long time but couldn’t say out loud.”
Matsushimaon also uses the human body as a canvas, often writing his Cantonese lines on nude women, before photographing the bodies, as Lousy does.
Hong Kong journalist’s famous Jiang Zemin interview goes from memes to art
Hong Kong journalist’s famous Jiang Zemin interview goes from memes to art
Professor Sonia Wong Yuk-ying, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s gender studies programme, says such work raises the question of whether it involves the sexual objectification of women.
Objectification, Wong says, occurs when one’s body is “rendered and reduced” to a subject matter that must appear as physically attractive.
However, she believes in letting the audience decide for themselves, and says that she would like to see more women in Hong Kong become bold enough to make public marks and erotic art themselves.
She adds that when we think about art of a more erotic or explicit nature, we traditionally don’t imagine the audience as being female. This makes it harder for women to envision themselves in the roles of creators, instead only seeing themselves as muses or models, pandering to the stereotype of women adopting a more passive role.
“It’s undeniable that there’s not a lot of space in such artistic disciplines for women to express their sexuality, especially in Hong Kong – the fact that we can’t think of many equivalents or examples right now says a lot on the matter.”
While Matsushimaon openly describes his art as “vulgar”, “intimate” and “sexual”, Lousy, however, asks: “What do you define as vulgar? I think it depends on how you see and measure it.
“Artists can’t always control their narratives. Maybe some of what I do can be defined as erotic art, but it’s nowhere near pornographic yet. The more conservative few may not get it, but I didn’t do it for them.”