Shok-1 created this beautiful piece of street art close to Brick Lane in Shoreditch/ London. It is called MasterPeace, just like the image that had been there before. In the same place used to be a picture of an x-ray of a hand making the peace sign. In 2017, Shok-1 transformed his own peace into this poppy flower with the same title. It was intended as a reminder of the past created for Remembrance Day.
The remembrance poppy is a flower that has been used since 1921 to commemorate military victims who died in war and resembles the common field poppy. It was inspired by a poem written by John McCrae in 1915 after he witnessed one of his friends die in World War I, called “In Flanders Fields”. The opening lines of the poem refer to the first flowers that grow in abundance on the soldiers’ graves in Flanders/ Belgium – the poppy flowers.
With nationalism, separatism, and isolation still on the rise, this piece by Shok-1 has lost nothing of its topicality and importance.
