Graffiti Artist Squid Talks About His Monkey King Graff

I have to admit I had not heard of the graffiti artist Squid  until I came across this image on @101GreatGoals twitter feed:

Vincent Tan (陳志遠), the billionaire Chinese-Malaysian owner of Cardiff City F.C., who is depicted here in red, about to be eaten by an irate Sun Wukong, aka the Monkey King, Painted by Cardiff Graffiti Artist Squid

I also had not heard of Vincent Tan (陳志遠), the billionaire Chinese-Malaysian owner of Cardiff City F.C., who is depicted here in red, about to be eaten by what appears to be an irate Sun Wukong, aka the Monkey King. Tan, it turns out, is not a very popular figure among fans of the Bluebirds, having changed the colors of their uniforms from blue and white to red and black when he purchased the team in 2010.

The upper left corner of the mural identifies the artist as Squid. There isn’t much on him online, although a quick Google search turns up a profile on the graffiti forum Fatcap which mentions that he is affiliated with the MK crew. His name also turns up on various Cardiff graffiti sites. Eventually I was able to track down his Flickr page, which includes a photograph of the mural dated March 12, 2014.  I emailed him to see if the allusion was intentional or not:

Have you ever heard of the Chinese legend of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong? Are you familiar with any Chinese comics or cartoons?

Yeah I’ve heard of the monkey king, I have quite a few books by Chinese tattoo artists with him in, I’ve read a few Lone Wolf and Cub comics, mostly samurai stuff which is probably Japanese now I think of it…..

For the sake of comparison, here is two-page spread showing Sun Wukong in ‘fierce mode’ (兇性) drawn by Hong Kong comic James Khoo Fuk-lung (邱福龍):

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