The Belgian coastal town of Ostend recently hosted the third edition of the contemporary street art festival The Crystal Ship.


We here at Hookedblog were in town for the duration of the festival to capture some of the international and national street artists at work in the city, adding to the collection of more than 40 permanent artworks and about fifteen large-scale murals from previous editions already installed around Ostend.

Two of this years invited artists who we were fortunate enough to catch up with were French street art Oak Oak and Belgian street artist Jaune.

Belgian Street Artist Jaune
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Regular readers of the blog will be familiar with the stencil work of Jaune, as the artist has been featured on the site on a number of occasions since we were first introduced to his stencil work in Ostend, at the first edition of the Crystal Ship festival back in 2016.

Since then we have seen Jaune hitting the streets of London with a number of pieces when he visited the city for the Moniker Art Fair. We also caught up with him in 2017 at the inaugural edition of the NuArt Aberdeen festival and again later that year in Stavanger, Norway for the Nuart festival. 

Jaune's ever-increasing number of his mischievous characters are much loved by many in the city of Ostend which has seen the Crystal Ship festival curator Bjørn Van Poucke invited Jaune back again and again with the artist now having installed his characters in the city as part of all three editions of the festival.

French Street Artist Oak Oak
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OakOak is a French street artist hailing from Saint Etienne and an artist whose work you are sure to have seen online and maybe in person if you are lucky enough.

Drawing inspiration from cartoons such as The Simpson’s, Calvin and Hobbes, Futurama, and computer games such as Nintendo’s Mario and Duck hunt, his fun street interventions are much loved and widely shared and reposted on social sites across the globe.

Oak Oak’s urban interventions, usually small in scale often see him adding painted elements to street objects and city furniture, transforming them into humorous street pieces.

Jaune and Oak Oak Collaborative Work
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Oak Oak and Jaune were both invited to add their works to festivals street art city trail and along with the individual pieces they both installed, the two artists collaborated on three unofficial pieces on the cities streets.

Using multi-layered stencils they combined both their characters to create three fun pieces together. We got to hang out with both artists as they worked on their third piece and captured them at work in a series of photographs.

Pictured above the two artists making a start on their collaborative piece along a small wall next to the beachfront in Ostend, Belgium. It's not the first time artist Jaune has painted this wall, the artist has two other pieces further along this wall from previous editions of the festival.





Jaune busy at work, carefully lining up the next stencil layer in his multi-layered pieces.

• See More: Belgian Street Artist Jaune hits the streets of London.

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The finished collaborative stencil piece by artists Oak Oak and Jaune featuring their characters battling it out on a wall next to Ostend beach. This was one of a number of pieces the two street artists worked on together during their time in the city, featured below are two additional pieces we managed to track down during our stay.

We have been told there are a least two more works that we missed, something to look out for on our next visit to Ostend!

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