World Paper Hong Kong

Slums to cities: street art's Pied Piper

Hong Kong (CNN) -- Another humid summer night in Hong Kong and another fly-poster is discretely pasting what looks like a photograph of an emaciated girl onto a wall on a busy side street.

But this is no ordinary fly-poster.

He is unassuming Canadian street artist Kaid Ashton, and the subject in the print is a young girl he recently photographed in the Filipino capital, Manila.

For the past seven years he's been traveling to some of the world's most dangerous slums documenting the people he meets with his camera. He then posts his work on walls around the cities he visits.

Now he's in Hong Kong, bringing his images of slum life to the busy streets of one of Asia's financial hubs. One of the world's wealthiest cities may seem an incongruous setting for Ashton's work -- but that's what he wants.

His current project, "People in Poverty," consists of 30 intimate portraits snapped during Ashton's travels to some of Asia's poorest places -- including the Tondo district and Maharlika settlement of Manila, Philippines. Ashton prints the photographs on wallpaper-like material before sticking them outdoors using a technique known as "wheatpasting."

Ashton aims to make people reconsider their surroundings by placing his photographs in unexpected locations, be it the wall of a housing estate or the pillar of an underpass.

He is always on the lookout for a potential spot, and spends his days scouring the city to find the perfect place.

"I look for something opposite the photo or something related to the colors," Ashton said. "Anything to frame the picture so it grabs people's attention and makes the background just as interesting as the image."

Wheatpasting -- a method that allows street artists to quickly put up a ready-made poster -- has been made famous by JR , a TED winner whose works have appeared worldwide, displaying highly-personal images of a town's residents on buildings, bridges and walls.

Ashton also pastes a caption next to the image, explaining the subject's story in English and Chinese.

"I find that if you tell someone a personal story of poverty, they are much more receptive to it," he said.

Ashton's street art is not political. It is about crossing cultures and getting to know people in the process.

"It's really nice to bring a portrait from Bogotá, Colombia, to the streets of Hong Kong and put it underneath a Chinese sign.

Back On The Streets: True Crime Hong Kong | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Back in February we brought you that would not be released. Despite apparently being pretty much finished, Activision canned the project. United Front Games’ open world action-them-up was put into a locked cupboard because Activision believed it wasn’t competitive with other games in the genre. Which is to say, they thought it was poop. And this came after almost a six months’ delay to add polish. Polish that Acti CEO Eric Hirshberg rather confusingly explained in November last year had “paid off”. However, clearly not enough. But now, release the party poppers, reports that Square Enix have announced they’ve acquired the game and plan to release is.

Activision’s position on the game was muddled to say the least. In November last year (somewhat in gobbledegook) his saying, “The additional development time invested in this game has really paid off, for gameplay mechanic the make the fighting and shooting as sophisticated as the driving, which is something that’s very hard to achieve in the open-world genre.” And then a few months later they ditched it for good.

True Crime: Hong Kong was intended to be a complete reboot of the True Crime series, the first two from Luxoflux (Streets Of LA and New York City) both getting very mediocre scores. In fact, a third game by Luxoflux had started development but was also canned after NYC performed so weakly. Clearly Activision believed in the IP enough to see the accurate city representation handed to another team, and then baulked on it yet again.

Square will be releasing the game, but without the name. The acquisition from Acti gets them the code, but not the IP. , “It’s too early to say what the name will be,” but promises the process will be “pretty straightforward”.

But why did Square pick it up when Acti clearly didn’t want to touch it?

“When we first saw and got our hands on the game we fell in love with it,” Singleton goes on to explain. “It’s one of those games where you don’t want to put the controller down.”

Controller indeed. The game was originally slated for a PC release, along with 360 and PS3, and since it was pretty much done (and all such games are developed on PC in the first place, along with Square’s established support for PC) it seems reasonable to assume this will stay the same.

United Front, the team who are more famous for having worked alongside other teams on games like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Just Cause 2 than their own Sony exclusive, ModNation Racers, are still working on the game say Square. This involves rehiring everyone they previously had to let go in February, and pushing to finish it all off completely. Square Enix’s London group say they are willing to give the game the time it needs to be fully realised, and as such aren’t willing to talk release dates yet.

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