Word: yan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Freedom in November. His son was at the White House to accept it on his behalf. Dr. Biscet unfortunately couldn’t be there; he spent another day as a Cuban prisoner of conscience, locked in a wretched cell. Before accepting his father’s award, Yan Valdes Morejon emphasized in a Boston Globe editorial that his father’s suffering has not diminished. Biscet has lost nearly 40 pounds and most of his teeth. Castro refuses to release Biscet, despite appeals from the United Nations and international human rights organizations...
...Kong's City Hall is the kind of canvas graffiti artists long for. Unsullied and several stories high, its white surface can be seen from some of the city's busiest roads. It has never been "tagged" - to use graffiti parlance - but that doesn't deter local artist MC Yan, who is famous for having left his work on, of all places, the Great Wall...
...breezy November night, Yan etches Chinese characters across most of the side of City Hall. They read "Save Queen's Pier" (an ironic appeal on behalf of a now demolished landmark), and the reason he can write them with impunity is because they are drawn using a laser pointer in high-intensity light - not spray paint. By standing on the roof of a parking lot across the street, he also avoids any danger of trespassing. When he's done, Yan erases the words by clicking a button on the laser pointer, connected to a laptop and projector at his feet...
...system used by MC Yan is known as L.A.S.E.R. Tag and is a creation of the Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), a New York City art group founded in 2005 to outfit the world's street artists with innovative, open-source technology. Given that L.A.S.E.R. Tag can be operated from hundreds of feet away, the opportunities for subversion are tantalizing. A message can be written on the face of a major public building and the perpetrators long gone before the authorities pinpoint where the laser came from. In a more everyday context, L.A.S.E.R. Tag's ability to allow artists...
...media lecturer Alice Arnold argues that if lighting-based expression has a real source, it's Hong Kong, because the city "has always been at the forefront of light signage." But there's just one snag: light pollution. Compared to Hong Kong's extravagantly lit skyscrapers, MC Yan's tags don't stand out as intensely as they should, no matter how big they are. "In New York we can be the brightest thing in town," says Powderly. "In Hong Kong, we've never felt like we were losing so badly." Perhaps his next project should be a system that...