South Korean Graffiti Writers Stress the Art of Graffiti.

I find it interesting when this blog is viewed outside of the United States. Eight views have been tracked from South Korea so far. This has prompted me to do a little research on what I first called "South Korean Graffiti Culture."  Looking up the graffiti culture of a place is an interesting way to find out a little bit about it. 

 

After a little research I realize that I usually consider graffiti to be part of a counter culture—which might not be quite accurate when it comes to South Korea.  The paragraphs below link to the articles about South Korean graffiti. 

If any reader of this entry knows more than I have shown here I ask them to leave a comment. 

This blog has received more views from Germany since I put up an entry on “German Graffiti Culture.”  But no one from abroad has ever left a comment.  Not many people from the United States have left me comments either. 

In America, graffiti is more about culture; bombing, illegal work, and that gets you respect. Korea is different, it is only about the image created and not the culture.

For a while, nobody in Korea really cared about graffiti in public. But recently, the government has officially made it illegal to paint on public spaces, and more citizens have begun to complain about it. I am personally attracted in certain ways to the illegality of public graffiti, though I try to paint on places that are easy to reverse if they decide to get rid of it. But ultimately, I try hard to make my pieces very attractive so that no one wants to get rid of them! I think you can compare it to a child drawing something on a wall – he loves to express himself, and so nothing can stop him. I do think that the true idea of graffiti is when it is created in public places and perhaps in an illegal way. But it’s quite hard in Korea to limit yourself as a graffiti artist in this way. It costs a lot of money for one thing, and also there are not very many good public spaces to work with. So why not earn money from hired pieces instead of wasting money all the time on public pieces? That is my mentality. In fact, I think by trying too hard to restrict graffiti to public spaces it limits me as an artist. If I only painted in public spaces, than I would lose out on many opportunities. For example, I recently painted one of the only hotrod big rigs in Korea that belongs to a famous Korean rock band, and I’ve also done pieces in Korean music videos. So why not use my artistic skill as a source of income? Is it any different than Tupac hiring someone to do a piece for one of his own music videos? Sure, it sometimes forces me to give up certain elements of self-expression when I have to cater to a customer, but I’d rather give up certain artistic elements and still earn money doing what I love than choose another source of income and give up all my artistic opportunities. I think all art shares a similar nature regardless of its form. Music, dance, fine arts – all of these share a fundamental purpose of expressing something in their own style. Only the materials that make up these art forms are what make them different.

Look up the artist who made the above statement at http://bfmin.com/. 

Educational stress, oil dependency, and nuclear power concerns are expressed in some Korean Graffiti.