I'm a big fan of street art, but I absolutely hate vandalism, even if the work is talented. I can think of very few things to do to a stranger than to come along and paint on their property, even if you are good at it. Vietnam has some pretty strict rules, yet street art does pop up in certain places like clockwork and while I have no proof of this, I think that the reason why people always are kind of polite with where they do their tags is because if the police or the public see them painting on certain temporary structures or buildings that are going to be demolished, they see no reason to waste police resources or to put what is most often some kids into jail over this.
Maybe they are warned. I have no idea how it works. But I do like the fact that the taggers seem to restrict their tagging to certain areas and very infrequently on private property.
This part of Danang has been unused for a long time. It was a kind of parking lot for the beach but very few people arrive there via car so it wasn’t really necessary. It was the old parking lot for a now defunct hospital and recently they started building something there and as per usual, the builders erected a corrugated steel fence around the area.
Within a few days, the spray-painters had started stopping by and I guess they were able to do this without getting in trouble because it only took about a week for almost the entire thing to be covered.
While I wouldn’t really call any of this super talented, there is some decent stuff in there. I think that often people who do only tags are doing so because they are concerned about the amount of time that they have before someone comes along and gives them a shouting at. It does appear as though most or near all of these were completed, so that leads me to believe that the people doing this were seen and nobody really minds. This is on one of the busiest streets in the entire area, so there were certainly people that saw them.
I don’t think there is any malice here, nor is there any real crime. You can see over the fence that there are air conditioning units in there already, and for a thief, a real criminal, that would be a big score if there truly wasn’t anyone watching.
You can see on one of these that there was some color tapering and since I have seen this being done before, I know that it takes a certain amount of skill. I'm impressed by it anyway.
I do wish that the government or a private business or property owner would embrace this sort of thing more than they already have by turning a blind eye to it happening on temporary structures though. I think there is a real opportunity for embracing artistic talent and perhaps increasing it. There could also be profits in it as was showcased by the unofficial graffiti park that existed with a small coffee shop that was shut down to be replaced with nothing about a year ago. That was such a disappointment because during that time, the amount of people that were tagging other properties actually dropped during that time.
There is a village of sorts that exists between here and Hoi An that tried to embrace street-art and turn it into a sort of tourism thing like they did in Penang, Malaysia, but the distance between this village and where people actually lived proved to be too great for most people to bother to go.
I guess i find it kind of neat that the people who are breaking the law technically, do seem to have some sort of respect for private property as well as the works of other artists as you will notice that nobody painted over anyone else's bits on this fencing.
I'd like to believe that there is a sort of code or "honor among thieves" going on here, but it is more likely just fear of the law and the rather extreme penalties that Vietnam has for crime.