The images in this post are by a very talented Taiwanese “graffiti” artist named Tsai Mengda (蔡孟达), AKA Kea, who I’ll be writing more about in a few upcoming posts. One aspect of his aesthetic reminds me of Banksy, and Kea seems to want people to think of him in the same category. Imitation may be a form of flattery, but Banksy must be annoyed by how many of his “imitators” – Kea and Thierry Guetta, the documentarian-turned-art-monster depicted in Exit Through the Gift Shop, chief among them - seem so thoroughly to miss any of the political substance of his work.

In fact, the entire celebration of “street art” and graffiti by the art establishment must drive someone like Banksy up a very dark wall. You know something’s amiss when the Los Angeles aristocracy host a street art celebration at MOCA, even if this kind of appropriation is just Capitalism 101. (For more on this process, see Thomas Frank’s fabulous “Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism”)

Mark Frank, writing for Modern Art Asia had this to say of Kea and the phenomenon of gallery graffiti while blurbing an exhibition of Kea’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai in 2010:

KEA bills himself as Taiwan’s most famous graffiti artist, but he lacks the street-cred of true masters like Banksy. His modest reknown comes more from hanging his work on walls than defacing them. His work is a celebration of pop-consumerism that embraces everything the international millennial generation really drools over—sex, pirates, dinosaurs and name brands.

One wonders if any Western chauvinism informs Mark Frank’s vaguely damning blurb (an entire “international millenial generation” reduced to its alleged affection for four things?). Yet from all I have observed in East Asia this past year, it seems very likely that Kea’s work lacks the subversive political sophistication Banksy possesses, especially when it comes to critiques of consumerism. Kea is also a graffiti artist who displays his work only in permitted spaces, not as disruptions of public space, and there’s just not much common soil for critiques of consumerism to grow from. All obvious visual and drafting talent noted, Kea has far less imagination than Banksy for what lies outside the narrow bounds of the marketplace.

Taiwan is, after all, now essentially a satellite of the People’s Republic of Capitalism, which is also the name of a great four-part Discovery channel documentary hosted by Ted Koppel. At one point in the documentary — part 2, I believe — Koppel is interviewing a designer and photographer, who laments that he cannot think creatively, that he thinks his mind is empty that way. When Koppel asks him why, the response is: “I think creativity is not encouraged in China; they just tell you one is one, and two is two, and don’t forget it. No creativity.” Kea is from Taiwan, which is presently a democracy (albeit one where political rivals routinely beat, club and permanently disable each other, and where faith in democracy is precarious), but you’d be hard-pressed to find any scholastic hotbeds of creativity in any East Asian countries. (Hell, do U.S. schools promote much creativity? It seems like they’re marching ever more towards standardized testing and memorization, not critical thinking and creativity. Then again, I didn’t really go to much high school, and always thought avant-garde musician/painter Captain Beefheart, AKA Don Van Vliet, had a great quip when he said “If you want to be a different fish, you have to jump out of the school.”)

Gross cultural generalizations aside, it doesn’t seem like Kea’s likely to do anything as edgy as what Banksy did, for example, with his guest “defacing” of the opening credits for The Simpsons:

I hesitated to post Kea’s image using President Obama’s likeness, for obvious reasons. To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything at all demeaning or “dehumanizing” about people being compared to, or rendered as, animals; I think we ARE animals, and in some ways, not even particularly good ones. These images might well be more insulting to monkeys, if they cared about representations of themselves or surfed the blogosphere. But my intent isn’t to insult anyone.

I recently saw a BBC documentary from 2008, Clever Monkeys, narrated by Richard Attenborough, and though I’d read about various monkeys — particularly the bonobos — this documentary still surprised me at times. Those of you with interest and a smidgen of ingenuity can check it out in its entirety, here, or in 6 lower-res parts, here. A You Tube search on “clever monkeys” also turns up a treasure trove of simian wonders.

And here are two more from Kea’s monkey series….

“I love the trite mythos of the outlaw,” wrote Tom Robbins, in his comic novel, Still Life with Woodpecker. “I love the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw. I love the black wardrobe of the outlaw…The outlaw boat sails against the flow, and I love it. Outlaws toilet where badgers toilet, and I love it. All outlaws are photogenic, and I love that…There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures, and I love those maps especially. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here, and I love that most of all.“

Great outlaws should be better known! Consider these three: Elmyr de Hory, Alves Reis, and Scott Scurlock. It should be noted that all three are dead, and that two of them died in poverty. Two also committed suicide, though one, an art forger, is rumored to have faked his death in order to escape actual death. Peaceful old age is a jewel rarely found cleaving to the heels of outlaws and, as with many famous painters, outlaws usually die penniless after a series of unfortunate events.

Elmyr de Hory, by far the greatest art forger the world has ever seen, successfully painted and sold as originals his counterfeit renditions of paintings by Picasso, Renoir, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse and Modigliani, among many others. Born to a rich Hungarian family in 1906, Elmyr went to art school in Budapest before moving to Paris, where he seems to have squandered some of his artistic acclaim and momentum for amusement and sexual experimentation.

This is one key aspect of the great outlaw: a certain shiftlessness, not exactly idleness or laziness, but awaiting the right stimulation or opportunity. It also helps a great outlaw’s stature to spend some time in a prison of particularly “nightmarish” reputation, as Elmyr did after being arrested for ties to his lover, a British journalist and alleged spy. The prison was Transylvanian and, of course, nothing but bats, castles, foreboding mountains, creepy royalty, bloodsucking, and other gothic nightmares come from there.

Elmyr survived his imprisonment in part by painting portraits of some guards and thereby currying favor. Yet soon after his release, de Hory was re-imprisoned in a German concentration camp, where he was badly beaten and had one of his legs broken. Elmyr claims to have escaped from the camp infirmary on a still-broken leg, though he is also a well-established fabulist, as was his official biographer, Clifford Irving (famous for his fake autobiography of Howard Hughes).

After escaping, he eventually returned to Paris and set about creating a new life. He most likely couldn’t have known that he was about to earn a reputation as one of the most talented criminals in history.

In 1974, Orson Welles released “F for Fake,” his final major film, which cast de Hory in the main role, playing himself. The film goes into detail about much of de Hory’s life, while also unspooling a fascinating prismatic essay on authenticity, identity and the basis of value for art.

And, thanks to this glorious age of free internet video, you can check out Welles’ sometimes hard-to-find gem right here.

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I’d originally planned for this post to include excursions into the lives of de Hory, Reis and Scurlock, but realize now that blog posts are made for more brevity. One’s enough for today.