Street Art

Wing-lun beamed as the cameras clicked about him. While it was no Nobel award or Fields Medal or anything super prestigious like that, the National Cutlture Medallion was stlil a strong affirmation of his contribution to the nascent street art scene.

Graffiti was not one of the things that would come to mind when ``art'' is mentioned. Yet Wing-lun was the first graffiti artist to be recognised by the city-state instead of being fined and thrown into prison.

The Culture Medallion came at a timely moment. There was a drive to enhance the urban landscape, giving it even more character than the mere epithet ofa ``green city''. Wing-lun lobbied for the use of tasteful urban graffiti as a means of bringing out a unique urban element, the kind of quirkiness that is peculiar to each city. He had been quickly shot down by the anti-graffiti law, but he spent nearly half his life to form a registered graffiti artist organisation that recognised and licensed graffiti artists to do street art, while at the same time negotitating with the governmnet and tourism board to gazette certain public places as being street art friendly, even up to the point of providing guidelines to tastefulness.

Many graffiti artists already in the original underground movement lampooned him, saying that such institutionalisation was against the very nature and essense of street art. But Wing-lun and poignantly pointed out that the sheer illicit nature in which current street art was done made it impossible to be accepted by the mainstream, and that having all their members, spaces and guidelines in the open made it easier for them to expand legally and quickly, and was the surest way of ensuring that their chosen art form would flourish.

Some finally took to his reasoning, while others kept decrying him as a sell out, but Wing-ln did not care. He had did his bit for his art, and the greater population has accepted it. To him, that was good enough.