What is the difference between growing up in a big city and growing up in rural America? The plain and obvious are the landscapes, the condensed open field opposed to the crowded streets growing people. These barriers are barren, they lack personality. Architects see a work of art planned to perfection, but growing up, all I saw was brick and concrete. So, every time an image was placed on the cement canvas, it not only brought out the personality of the building or the area, it represented the kind of people that lived there.

The south side of Seattle isn’t all bad; it has its ups and downs like most cities. But every so often you would have something to look at, to admire when walking down SODO, or crossing Rainier, or waiting for the light to change by Jefferson Park. A lot of it was just names, or grievances people had with the area. People stretching their egos across the freeway with spray painted letters you could only read if you knew the style. A ghetto version of cursive. Graffiti to look at, something that isn’t a grey wall. But not all art is the same, especially across the country.

Graffiti has its roots in New York city subways. Originally it was called writing because what was being written were names and phrases. These words were taken from one end of the city to the other end by train car and subway stations. For the writers doing it, it was a way to see their name, their mark, become part of the city. Writers were also actively involved in the rap scene as it developed in New York. Writing was the written part of hip hop connected to the spoken and moving parts of rapping and break-dancing. Writers were active listeners, break-dancers, producers and even rappers themselves that were trying to get somewhere in the world. It was another outlet for those less fortunate to express themselves in the crowded, mundane, city life. To early writers it was liberating. This was a source of freedom from boredom, but it didn’t last for long. As it became more popular, the city started to enforce the areas getting tagged. It practically shut down the writers on the trains and tunnels; making it not worth the risk of throwing their names on cars if it meant danger and almost certain jail time. To the non-writing residents, graffiti was a symbol that the city was wild, that it lacked control. However, this didn’t stop writers. It only encouraged them to leave the cars and start writing on the streets.

Graffiti came with an emphasis on ego. “Whose name traveled the farthest?” and “Who had the best style?” were two questions that were represented in early graffiti. The words carried no meaning other than it was there, and it was seen by the other writers. That was all that mattered. But that started to change. Graffiti started to develop a voice, it started to have more meaning, and it wasn’t just scratches and marks on the walls anymore. As people moved around from neighborhood to neighborhood, they left memorials to what it meant to be there, living in the concrete jungle. Sooner or later it became harder to tell the difference between what had the right to be there, and what was thrown up by some kid. The only ones who knew that were the owners of the buildings. The public eye could only guess between legal and illegal. The spread of hip hop was also a contributive factor. Since graffiti was the written form of rap, then where rap went, so did graffiti. The scale and talent of graffiti was rising fast alongside the world of hip hop. By the 1980’s, graffiti and writing had been a staple of urban culture from east to west coast. It might have started in New York, but it has since moved out into the rest of the world’s cities. Today, it has become a worldwide phenomenon. If there are buildings anywhere, they get painted and sprayed by artists and writers. Both those making a living and kids that want their voices to be heard amongst the chaotic life among the brick. Graffiti writers became less thought of as punks and hoodlums and more and more as recognized painters that worked on 8 ½-foot by 11-foot canvases. It might still be illegal in most cases, but more and more people were getting excited to see their home change into its own work of art.

Some of the more famous artists even went legit, taking what they had done in alleys and were hired to place, print and paint their designs on the sides of buildings and in parks. Shepard Fairey, the man who designed and printed the poster for Obama’s, “Hope” was originally just someone pasting his pictures of Andre the Giant to the sides of walls with the words “Obey”, a threating non-message that scared the public, pointing out peoples fear of the unknown. He now owns his own brand, “Obey” and is featured as a gallery artist pulling in thousands. He also owns multiple forms of alternative media, graphic design and clothing company. Swoon also comes to mind when you think of professional street artist. She was a formally trained artist who grew up in 80’s New York. She was someone just trying to get her name out there. Now she has gallery shows dedicated to just her works. She sees the street art market as a way to sustain herself. There is a bit of corruption in the work when people are taking it down not because they don’t want it on their wall, but because they want to sell it. Of course, she acknowledges that public art really can’t be “stolen”. Either way, she takes advantage of the path that was made for her by the writers and artists that came before her. Aside from Swoon and Fairey, probably most famous of all is Banksy. This artist has refused to go street legal and leaves his work everywhere. He comments on the cities and their people, just by placing an image there. Each work of his carries so many meanings from their content and from the controversy of the illegality in his work. He even drove New York mad when he decided to take an “artist residency” in the city for a month. The desire for his work speaks upon the status quo, the paradox of providing a tranquil scene in a crowded street and bringing people to low income neighborhoods where they never would have gone before. Because of these artists, graffiti and street art are at a crossroads. Is it vandalism or art? Sometimes its one or the other but most of the time it’s both.

So how does Asian and Pacific America fit into this. What makes Asian American graffiti and street art different from American graffiti? Is it the style or location? Does it have to do with the messages it carries? Does American culture impact Asian culture or is it the other way around? Well, like other ethnic communities, it’s a form of self-expression first and for most. To give a voice for those who can’t speak up. Each generation of writer or artist is always influenced by their predecessor. It comes with a certain freedom in defacing a wall, sometimes so much that it can kick you out of entire countries like it did with David Choe.

Choe is a Korean American artist who grew up in L.A. He was influenced by the writers around him. He had a desire to create and destroy, similar to that of the early writers. His father, who had been forced away from art by his Korean ancestry, encouraged him at a young age to keep creating art. Choe dropped out of art school and started looking for work at an advertising firm. He got picked up to draw movie posters which sounded like his dream job at the time. He found out later that he didn’t like being pinned down and told what to do to make a living. With that in mind, he decided to leave his job security behind and invest his time in making murals, commissions from magazines like hustler, and posting his paintings in café galleries. But, at the apex of his ego he got caught in japan and was imprisoned for 3 months in a Japanese prison. This changed his view of things. It brought him closer to his Korean Christian upbringing. It drove his career into commercial gallery work. But it also just made him the biggest sellout, in his own eyes. All he wanted to do was graffiti, but he knew he couldn’t do it the same way anymore. For David Choe, discarding his ego was a step in the right direction. He no longer wanted to do things just for himself, he wanted to help others as well, to give back. Choe as an artist was heavily influenced by his upbringing and the mistakes he has made in his life. While his art might not carry much weight for him visually, the ability and opportunity it gives him makes him stand out amongst his fellow street artists and defacers. He lives his life at high risk and that translates into what he is plastering on walls. The places he would visit, hopping from city, state and country leaving his mark. For him, he just wants to do what he wants. Combining crude imagery and traditional graffiti styles. He isn’t too invested in his messages; he just wants to make the stuff he wants to see.

The sense of ego that Choe felt early in his career is a staple of that 80’s graffiti writing. To be the best and too see your name everywhere. The Mele Murals was a project taken by two Hawaiian artists who found themselves on the Mainland in San Francisco, returning back to their roots to learn what it means to be Hawaiian. Unlike Choe, The Artists “Esrtria” and “Prime” learned to forgo their egos, their sense of freedom, and started to listen to their community when they did the Mele Murals in Hawaii. They originally met up to paint their town but found themselves creating their own styles of life, what they saw and not what the others saw. But through the Mele murals they learned to listen to those around them, their family that they found while painting these murals. It helped them reconnect with their culture, something they have subconsciously searching for. They knew they were Hawaiian, but first they had to strip away their self-centered perspectives and comeback home to their roots. After they painted the Mele Murals they returned to the old ones that had upset their community, the ones that stilled carried their sense of pride and selfishness and painted it as the grey wall it originally was. To Asian American street artists, sometimes it’s about the freedom they didn’t have, and for others it’s a journey they take to find themselves in the world.

Lady Aoki has more control over what she does. Coming over from Japan at a young age, always distant from nature, she decided to create her own. She worked with stencils at the beginning of her career and later worked up to whole walls and murals. While Choe’s work follows his freedom and destruction, Aoki has a focus around love, both emotional and sexual. Different they may be, but both artists share a sense of ego and the freedom of creating what they want.

Author’s note: I am still researching east Asian street art so I have not completed this section of my draft yet.

Not only do American cities great beautifully scared, but so do the cities in the East as well. The New York subway has grown into the world of Taiwan, where the coastal city of Kaohsiung carries most of Taiwan’s street art. Art is scattered all over the Lingya district with color bursting from the walls of apartment buildings even the former Japanese Communication Centre in Fongshan and Pier 2 Art District. Some of the imagery is of wildlife and some even includes basketball players from the US. Taipei also carries a lot of local street art in the Ximen district paired next to international work done by other Asian street artists, the work plastered in parks and alleyways. Even in Singapore, a country with strict laws that ban chewing gum has murals commissioned from the government to liven up their cities. Over in Asia, it appears to be more accepted, depending on where you are, to paint over the walls.

Work Cited:

Lewisohn, Cedar, and Henry Chalfant. Street Art: the Graffiti Revolution. Tate Publishing, 2009.

“Finding Street Art in Asia.” Expert Abroad, 22 Jan. 2019, expertabroad.com/street-art-in-asia/#Kaohsiung.

Nakamura, Tadashi, director. Mele Murals. KCET, 19 May 2019, www.kcet.org/shows/pacific-heartbeat/episodes/mele-murals.

Gallard, Jean. “Lady Aiko.” Widewalls, 2013, www.widewalls.ch/artist/lady-aiko/.

Moukarbel, Chris, director. Banksy Does New York. Cecchi Gori Entertainment, 2015.

Silver, Tony, director. Style Wars (1983). YouTube, YouTube, 13 Jan. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9KxbaSU-Eo.