Yes, the Chinese Practice Graffiti Too!

I had the extreme pleasure of spending this past weekend at a conference in New York City – a timely trip considering the nature of this project. Having lived right outside of the city all summer, I knew right where to find the grafitti hot-spots. Yet while Manhattan and the East Village certainly offer some exciting grafitti options, it is Chinatown which ultimately contains the most interesting and unique samples of grafitti in the city.
Since Saturday afternoon of my conference afforded me a couple hours of free time, I naturally wanted to visit some of my favorite haunts discovered during the summer. Thus, my motives for visiting Chinatown weren’t entirely graffiti-based – admittedly, the main thrust of my visit was to grab some Sichuan chicken. However, during my journey through Chinatown, I discovered some graffiti gems.
One of the most interesting graffiti trends I discovered was the use of the sides of vans and other vehicles as a writing space. This naturally caused me to question whether these acts of vandalism were committed by the individuals owning the vehicles, or whether the owners were the unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate, depending on your perception) recipients of some impromptu artwork. Since Gregory Snyder in his book Graffiti Lives points out that some of the earliest graffiti manifested itself on the sides of railway cars, I take the stand that perhaps this “van vandalism” is a throwback to this early graffiti style. Furthermore, since New York City officially ended railroad graffiti in 1989 by refusing to run redecorated trains, this event likely gave rise to van graffiti also (Snyder 31).
I ran across three graffiti-covered vans during my trek through Chinatown, yet only the one emblazoned with the word “left” held any discernable message – the other two were likely just throw-ups or tags. Yet since they are not static spaces, these vans allow the writer of the graffiti to create a moving message – that is to say, one that will be seen my more people than if it were simply on a wall. Snyder highlights the moving graffiti message as an important means of unauthorized communication. Says Snyder: “the end of the train era also freed writers from underground tunnels and turned them into experts of urban exploration in cities all over the world” (31). Thus, while some of the original train-writers may feel they have lost the true essence of graffiti by losing the origin of train-writing, this inability to continue writing on trains opened up the stage for exploration on new media.
Thus, after trains lost their viability as a canvas, we began to see not only vans, but also walls, signs, stairwells, and even phone booths being employed in the service of the graffiti artists. As graffiti is an important method of both communication and of self-expression, the choice of place to showcase one’s graffiti skills is a choice that greatly can impact the message of the graffiti. My trip through Chinatown provided me with many diverse samples of writing spaces, all of which seem somehow fitting to the graffiti they contain.