Chinese 3D Street Artist Hailed As "Chalk God"

Yesterday, many photographs of 3D chalk art spread on Sina Weibo [a Chinese microblog service like Twitter], with the talented person who created these artworks being nicknamed “Chalk God” by netizens. One netizen said: “Is he an architect like in ‘Inception‘?” There were even netizens shouting one after another: “This isn’t chalk, this isn’t chalk.” Through a search, Nanjing media discovered that the 3D chalk art first appeared on a post in the Henan section of Tianya [a popular Chinese internet BBS forum], with the poster called “tntu3d“. A phone call confirmed that he is the “Chalk God”, but we can call him Mr. Hou.

At the center of this experiment is NeochaEdge, the first and only creative agency of its type in China. It was started in 2008 by two Americans, Sean Leow and Adam Schokora, to showcase the work of illustrators, graphic designers, animators, sound designers and musicians from across China. It now has 200 member-artists; NeochaEdge pays them per project to work on campaigns and product designs for brands like Nike, Absolut vodka and Sprite. [...] Members of NeochaEdge are a far cry from Ai Weiwei, the 53-year-old Chinese artist and dissident who was recently detained by the government. These graphic designers, sound artists and animators have other motivations.


With regards to his own creative ideas, Mr. Hou said: “I think these 3D artworks actually aren’t that rare/surprising, but the idea is very key, and only with the idea can you move people. For example, I once went to a tourist sight/attraction, and there was a sculpture at this intersection. Below the sculpture, on all four sides, were a bunch of advertisements for counterfeit official documents. I felt this was so representative of China today, so I started drawing, never expecting to become so popular.” Mr. Hou expressed that the piece that he is most satisfied with was “drawing ‘happy birthday’ for my son’, and the vegetable planting piece was created last year when stealing vegetable games were really popular.

Defne Ayas, an art history instructor at New York University in Shanghai, put it this way in an e-mail: “For some artists in this younger generation, the new political has become the ‘market.’ They tend to be curious and friendly to the market; they don’t want to miss out on its opportunities.”