Tang Yuting, Wang Yuanyuan

    cheekywang@hotmail.com

    MORE than 600 people celebrated their love of music and hip-hop culture at the city’s first Shenzhen Hip-hop Festival which was held Saturday at F518 Idea Land in Bao’an District.

    The festival, which was organized by expatriates in the city, featured music performances, parties and graffiti painting.

    “About 250 tickets were pre-sold before the festival opened and more people came to buy tickets before the performances started. Half of them were foreigners and half were Chinese people. It was a great success,” said festival show director Adrian Blackstock. “We had about 30 performers including rappers, poets, dancers, beat-boxers and graffiti artists. Most of them were local students and expatriates in Shenzhen and some were from Guangzhou and Hong Kong,” he said.

    “This was a great night, a good opportunity to release yourself and meet more people,” said Joel Anderson, from Britain, who attended the event. “I’ve been in Shenzhen for about six months and wanted to get to know more local people and learn more about them. Tonight I finally had the chance to meet a lot of students from Shenzhen University and they were great fun.”

    The festival was organized by shenzhenlocalmusic.com, and Blackstock said he hopes that it could become an annual event in Shenzhen, saying that they “want to promote it among Chinese communities, letting more local people know about hip-hop culture and enjoy good music.”

    Many overseas business people and musicians attended the festival, and some opened booths in the hope of making a profit.