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 see is brick and concrete. So, every time an image was placed on the cement canvas it brought personality of not only the building or the area, it represents the kind of people that live 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 Rainer, 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 just a way to leave your mark on the world. It corresponded with hip hop culture. There was a source of freedom, an emphasis on ego. “Who owned this spot?” and “Who was the best?” were two questions that were represented in early graffiti. There wasn’t any meaning to it other than it being there, 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 graffiti doing this. 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 what some punk drawing on the wall and stuff that had the right to be there. The only ones who would know that are the owners of what was tagged and defaced in the public eye. But with the scale and talent of graffiti rising, it soon became something that started in New York, and moved out into the world. It has become a worldwide phenomenon. If there are buildings anywhere, they get painted and sprayed by artists making a living and kids that want their voices to be heard amongst the chaotic life among the brick. Graffiti artists became less of punks and hoodlums and more recognized painters that worked on 8 ½-foot by 11-foot canvases. It might still be illegal in some cases, but more people were excited to see their mystery artists at work.

Some of the more famous artists even went legit, taking what they had down in allies 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. Swoon who was a professionally trained artist who grew up in 80’s New York, was someone just trying to get her name out there. Now she has gallery shows dedicated to just her works. And probably most famous of all is Banksy. This artist has refused to go street legal and leaving his work everywhere. He commentates about the environment and its people just by posting a photo there. Each image of his carries so many meanings to the content and to the controversy of his illegal work there, sometimes even driving the town insane with their desires with his work. 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. Well, like other ethnic communities, it’s a way for those less fortunate to express themselves. To give a voice for those who can’t speak up. 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 dropped out of art school and started looking for work at an advertising firm that could use his work. 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 invest his time in making murals on 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. Unlike Choe, 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. 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.

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.

Sources (So Far):

• https://expertabroad.com/street-art-in-asia/#Kaohsiung
• Mele Murals, Documentary
• Street Art Revolution, Printed Book
• https://www.widewalls.ch/artist/lady-aiko/
• Banksy Does New York, Documentary
• Joe Rogan Experience #563