A few hours before we boarded our plane back to Clark in Pampanga, we took a final walk along the streets of Kota Kinabalu and came across the remnant of an old building covered with eye-popping graffiti. To say that it was Andy Warhol-esque is a bit of an understatement. I had always been fascinated by street art, especially graffiti which, if executed with fine taste, always presented a welcome appeasement to the eyes.
Kota Kinabalu Street Graffiti | Malaysia
The Ruined Canvas of the Welfare Department
It was also a good way of expressing one's unconveyed emotions. Being able to draw had always been my never-ending frustration; aside from stick figures and egg-shaped round objects, there was nothing else I could draw on blank papers and bland white walls. I remembered back in college, my best friend Jacobsladder and I would take to vandalism to express our madness. We would write down lyrics of songs from premier punk bands of the 1970s and juxtapose them with our own amateur, wannabe poetry compositions.
The structure pictured here was the old Land and Survey building, which was later named the Welfare Department Office under the Department of Social Welfare, dating back to the British colonial administrative years. The building burned down in the early 1990s and was reduced to its current state of rubble. It had lain untouched and undeveloped for more than twenty years, positioned just behind the towering HSBC establishment.
Sabahan Creative Expression vs. Urban Vandalism
Soon, a number of Sabahan artists gifted with steady hands and superb imaginations painted the remaining walls and flooring of the damaged building. The result was an enigmatic mixture of black-and-white and vibrant colored graffiti that was worthy of being shown in a gallery exhibit. Even in a state of ruin and neglect, the site had transformed itself into a canvas where individuals with artistic freedom and creativity could sketch, paint, and write down their emotions through a form of art they furiously excelled at and were madly passionate about.
In Metro Manila, we had the often-maligned "MMDA Art," which was implemented by a former chief of the agency known for a questionable artistic taste and an absurd color scheme combination of light blue and pink. It was a good start, though, for some youths who had time on their hands to instead channel their frustrations through meaningful art, moving those hands of theirs up and down, left and right, creating shades of gray, black, and shadows while spray painting and transforming the walls around our city into their own canvases.
If These Modern Walls Could Talk
I preferred to see this form of art gather traction and become popular, choosing its artistic effect over the scrawls left by militant activists on the columns of the LRT and MRT, which, if you asked me, were nothing but overused doldrums of political slogans. Who knew, maybe the next Warhol was just around the bend, itching to spray paint an unused wall and let art flow along like spoken words, melodic harmony, and hymns.
I remembered an old man I saw in Monumento once; he liked to scribble phrases that ended with "Wins," for example, "Erap Wins," and so on. One could see traces of his handiwork all over the city of Manila. He might still have been alive or might have passed on into the afterlife, but his art—even those simple and seemingly meaningless "Wins" words he wrote down—left a message of attainable victory lingering as a possible occurrence in our everyday living.
How much more powerful would the effect be if that old man had the ability to also draw abstract yet striking images on our city walls? "If these walls could talk," they do not, but if you give them the opportunity to convey an expression through graffiti, they will tell a thousand words.
