KIKK Festival

Mr Bingo was born in 1979. In 1980 he started drawing. There wasn’t a lot to do in Kent. Mr Bingo is called Mr Bingo because when he was 19 he won £141 at the Gala Bingo. He’s been making it rain ever since. In 2011 he began the project Hate Mail on Twitter, where strangers paid him to send a hand-drawn offensive postcard to a name and address of their choice. Like much of his work, the project started as ‘a drunk idea’, but ended up being exhibited in galleries and gaining notoriety among the global press. In summer 2015, he ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund a high-end art book of his Hate Mail illustrations. The campaign, which was launched with a rap video, for which Mr Bingo wrote and recorded an original song, was set to run 28 days but was successfully funded within 9 hours and finished 386% funded with 3,732 backers, making it the most successful Kickstarter for a book in the UK ever. After a successful 15 year career as an illustrator, in 2015 Mr Bingo made a decision to stop working for clients and go it alone. Nobody really knows how he makes a living now, but somehow he does.