Knocking Off the Street: The Subversive Writings of Hong Kong's Grassroots Kings

ABSTRACT This article examines how two grassroots street artists in Hong Kong, the King of Kowloon (Tsang Tsou‐choi) and the Plumber King (Yim Chiu‐tong), intervene in the city's everyday visual order. Moving beyond celebratory collective memory narratives and easy analogies to graffiti, it frames their works as subversive urban practices that rework regimes of visibility through which authority and capital are spatialized. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, the article develops “knockoff” as an analytic lens, arguing that the subversiveness of Tsang's and Yim's practices lies in their strategic mimicry of dominant visual languages and their tactical engagements with the urban landscape. Through these knockoff tactics, they produce vernacular claims to territory, recognition, and belonging that illuminate urban inequality and the contested boundaries of power in a late‐capitalist, postcolonial city. The article thus locates the possibility for an art of resistance emerging from grassroots street practices that confront unequal urban visual regimes through the city's ordinary surfaces and circulations.