What Stains and What Fades: Do Malaysia’s Streets Have Anything to Say About it?
This is the second part in a collaborative series between CHL and student Oskah Dunnin, who undertook a Masters of Asian and Pacific Studies. You can read more about him here. This month, we present to you Oskah’s reflections and interactions in Malaysia.
Graffiti is illegal in Malaysia, yet it thrives. The streets are covered by spray paint, stickers and anime character murals. Surprisingly, the art is often – but not always – apolitical. Instead, artists tell stories of human relationships, write poetry and celebrate cultural diversity.
For some local artists, graffiti is an important way to live life in accordance with Islam. To others, graffiti is a weapon to redefine who controls the street.
My first night in Kuala Lumpur was spent ambulance-hopping with an American’s broken skull and blood on my new white sneakers. Just half an hour earlier, the man had drunkenly fallen up a flight of stairs. We reached the hospital sometime after midnight.
As I returned alone at 4AM, staff had begun their clean-up operation. In plastic buckets their grey wash water had turned a lazy shade of red, and the concrete staircase was slick with white suds.
By the time I left for Penang, the blood was still there. It had set into the walls, and just like a scratched-away sticker or painted-over tag, the memory of that night had stained itself into the hostel. In Malaysia, what’s meant to fade lingers, and what’s meant to stay is always at risk of being painted over.
Interview One
“If you try, you’ll die doing this.”
Ekmlx is a graffiti artist whose anime character murals are displayed on the walls, power boxes and alleys near the Pasar Seni MRT station in Kuala Lumpur. As children walked past during our interview, Ekmlx emptied his jean pockets to reveal a set of squashed Pokémon cards, which he gave away as gifts. When I asked why he did this, Eklmx said, ‘it gives them something to look forward to every day.’
“Even before school I was drawing comics as a young boy. With my brother and sister at home with me, I would take all our pens and printing paper to draw on, and that would get my siblings in trouble with dad. Then when I started school, I’d come home and my workbooks would be filled with drawing. I’d draw everywhere, even on my examination papers, which my teachers always marked a big cross against.
What I know about graffiti comes from MySpace. That’s how we saw other artists, and it’s where we learned about the big international graffiti events and some local shows. When I moved to KL, I kept going to exhibitions, graffiti meet-ups and comic events. If we were lucky sometimes there would be a special exhibit that allowed us to watch the artist draw, and that’s how I’d get to know them.
In Malaysia, we have maybe a few big comics. There’s Kampung and Gila-Gila, that’s all. It’s not like the US, where every comic can be found in big stores with major distribution and publishers. I pray to see the latest cartoonist in Malaysia, because you can’t always see the latest painting in a museum or gallery.
If you try, you’ll die doing this. The comic artists that are still around do online work, and sometimes they publish special books, but it’s not the same as printed paper.”
“In this alley no one cares if you graffiti; there are no police, and the building owners are supportive. Officially, you must obtain permission from the government, and that takes a very long time. I know in some countries people only graffiti at night because it’s safer. Big artists you see on these streets, the police don’t bother them because the building owners like the work.
A lot of people think graffiti is only about vandalism. For popular artists like Fahmi Reza graffiti is about sending a street message. Reza was an early graffiti artist, and he always caught himself in controversy with the previous government. He would criticise any mistake the government made through art. His street posters, flyers and stickers inspired so many artists in Malaysia, but not so many of these artists want to fight with the government like Reza. Some do this just to have money.
For me, even if I do not have success this is something I should try to do. In Islam we are told we must achieve something before we die. As a Muslim, I choose to make and share art before I die.”
Interview Two
"The small things that stack up.”
Taz is a Penang-based artist known for vibrant spray paint and caricatures. Before I arrived in Penang, a lot of local artists had all said the same thing: go check out Cultprint. The studio serves some of Malaysia’s leading street talent, including Ernest Zacharevic, an artist known as the ‘Banksy of Penang.’ It was here I met with Taz, an artist employed by Cultprint.
“Graffiti started here in the early 2000s. I was born in ‘97, so by then I was still a little thumb. I thought it was really cool that people could go around making art, that you could see people’s names on the walls, and that’s what I wanted, to see my name on those walls when I went out. It felt freeing. I’ll reference Banksy here, ‘big corporations like McDonalds, phone brands, banks, they don’t ask permission to put up advertisements in front of your eyes.’ So, it shouldn’t be a problem if I’m just writing my name.
That’s the difference between graffiti and street art. Sometimes you just want to go out bumming, you get to write ‘f--- the police’ and all that, but then there are times where you’re trying to do commission jobs and things are a bit more serious. You’re trying to get a bit more subject matter in, you’re worried about the composition. Not to say one is more important than the other, both have their charm.
I scribbled a lot in notebooks. In high school my friends wanted me to hit their names up, and I’d sell the design for five ringgit, ten ringgit, basically running a small business as a teen. After high school I saw an exhibition hosted by some of the KL boys like Cloak, Kenji, a bunch of the big guys. It was like ‘woah, you can smash out such a big mural with just spray paint?’ That was big. Like, you could possibly make money by changing the colour of walls? Yeah, I’m down. That’s how I started out.”
“Honestly, I figured that art was for me during COVID. My job dished out 80% pay cuts and still expected us to turn out for work – the same hours, for 80% less pay. Screw that. At 20% pay, I’d rather just be sleeping. I’m not an art major. I started with just letters, and after I learnt those letters, that’s when I met other graffiti artists who taught me about structures, figures, and more realistic things.
I’m still learning those finer details, still evolving. I’ve definitely toned down how loud I am. I used to be a lot more rebellious, way more hardcore. But today, a lot of clients already know what they want.
When I first said to myself that I wanted to be an artist, all I wanted to do was paint. Now I realise there’s a lot more set-up and organisation to it, a whole lot of time management is involved, and all these little things add up to make an artist an artist. The term ‘graffiti artist’ hasn’t changed much for me.
People ask, ‘is it propaganda?’, ‘is it art?’, ‘is it just a face lift for a building?’, ‘is it gangsterism?’ These are the small things that stack up. Graffiti itself doesn’t change. It’s still raw vandalism.
I fit somewhere nicely in the middle of full illegality and commercial white space. I’m not too fussed about where I am on that line though. I think more about what I can do and what jobs I can take. Let me say but, I’ve never seen one of the official government permit papers. They do exist, and people definitely do ask for them, but most times if the house owner is cool then graffiti is a cool thing to do too.”
Interview Three
“Before COVID and after COVID.”
During my time in Penang, I spoke with a member of the Hin Bus Depot’s curation team. The Hin Bus Depot is a major community hub that regularly hosts markets and galleries for local artists. On weekends, the bus depot attracts both locals and foreigners who listen to musical performances, view work on display, and pay cash for art – whether they be tattoos, stickers or cameras.
“Back in 2014, there were a lot of contemporary art spaces around here, but they would only display art in white boxes. The work we host in the Bus Depot would be deemed unsuitable for those spaces.
A space like this is important because a lot of artists – beyond even the street artist – need contemporary art spaces to display their work. It’s a treat having this space where artists can consolidate their networks, form bodies, present exhibitions and exchange their work for monetary value.
I’ve curated the Bus Depot for a year now, and have been doing my own projects since late 2018. People break Penang’s art culture into ‘before COVID’ and ‘after COVID.’ How artists practised before COVID was very different, and I think that’s because the COVID break permitted a lot of artists to re-evaluate their practise. But COVID also also meant a lot of artists stopped practising art. That means what artists do has changed, not just in Penang, but across Malaysia as a whole.”
Interview Four
“A new market of readers.”
Throughout the old colonial George Town streets stood sheetmetal fences and, perplexingly enough, poetry. When Taz and I returned to Cultprint after visiting his studio, I asked if he knew the artist behind these tags. Little did I know that sitting next to me in a moon boot was the poet herself – Trina Teoh.
“I want to create a new market of readers. A lot of what you see on the streets are warning signs and directions. They aren’t pretty things. It’s definitely not what I want to read on the streets.
My dad, he’s a businessman who would never read for leisure, and like a lot of people in this day and age he won’t read anything anymore. But he’s my target audience. I’m not doing this for people who already read, I know they’ll read my stuff anyway. And this isn’t about writing a story or anything connected, I’m just writing an outline of what you’re going through in the context of what’s beautiful in life.
It’s not all I write about, but most of my work talks about spirituality, romance and mortality. These are the main parts of humanity, and they’re what I keep circling back to.”
Interview Five
“Our cans weren’t for painting.”
As Tina and I finished our interview, I asked the Cultprint staff if they had any recommendations for who to speak with next. Both Tina and Taz offered the same name – Bibichun.
“When you’re in a dream you can’t remember where you’ve started, you kind of just dive into the present. I was born in Penang, on the mainland side, so the island has a strange but familiar kind of bite. By mid-2025, I will have hosted my second solo show, and that’ll mark ten years since my first. It took me a long time to figure out what to do, how to do it, and to get the confidence to follow through on it.
I started painting at a very young age, but it definitely wasn’t something I wanted to be doing. Growing up in a difficult Chinese family, financial security was always the top goal. It was the absolute priority. Health came second. Art had never in the least been considered part of the hierarchy.
In Malaysia, there’s this schoolyard stereotype that the art stream is where people go when they fail their exams. Navigating that pressure is quite tough. Kids don’t face real financial issues, there’s just the constant pressure to achieve, and growing up you have to find your own way or please your family.
So, you become obedient and don’t ask questions in order to take the easy road out, which does often work. The other way is you take your freedom with all the costs that come with that. If you can afford to do it, you can survive okay enough.
Art is my way of navigation. Human beings always desire freedom, but at the same time we need rules to keep check on each other so we don’t cross any lines. It’s how we achieve harmony and coexistence. If I can’t get something one way, there’ll be another solution. Sometimes I break the law, but if you’re not caught then you aren’t a criminal. At least, that’s how I see the law.
Before we understand or research anything, our soul comes from other things – other mouths, other ideas. Even reading a book I’ll sometimes wonder, ‘Am I allowing other people to influence my thoughts?’ People can come up with original ideas, but we all influence each other. The so-called written down facts we find in books, they’re important because once the majority conform to it, then it becomes a fact.”
“Now I’m in the business of fine art, but I started off on the street. Most of us found graffiti in KL, even if graffiti started long before KL in places like Johor. Growing up, I got to see the art my friends do, even if I didn’t agree with their work because it was heavily influenced by the West.
Back then, before the internet, we were all influenced by magazines from Singapore. Then came the era of the internet, and with it came hip hop and the graffiti movement to Malaysia. For my friends, they wanted to ‘keep it real’ – they had to walk like ‘that’, talk like ‘that’, dress like ‘that’, even their work had to look like ‘that’ to be visually relevant for Western taste.
I didn’t have the tools back then. Spray can nozzles weren’t available, nor as convenient to use as they are now, so I had to deal with whatever shit cans we had in Malaysia, which were always over-pressured, runny and gave flat colours. Our cans weren’t for painting, they weren’t for painting like artists.
There are very little people in Malaysia trying to push a unique Malaysian style. If I could tie anything back to Malay-ness visually, I’d say there are only two people. One is retired, he disappeared from the internet and the scene itself. He tried to implement Malaysian flora into his tags. The other, Abdul Rasheed, is more recent. He incorporates batik wax and cracks into his visual work. Instead of painting tags, he does images of any subject matter with this cracked line look.
These two artists are the most important artists in Malaysia, definition wise. Murals have also been catching up in popularity, so there are a lot more picture-based works than tags these days. It’s given local art two sides: there’s the street art movement on one side, and the graffiti art movement on the other."
"A lot of the KL boys were educated in architecture because somehow the technical drawings are closely related to text-building and alphabet creations. Across Malaya to Borneo, a lot of people come to KL for their education, so it’s a hotpot of academic discussion, and when you have young students exploring their identities, you naturally have political discussion. Even our former prime minister printed propaganda posters using potato and tapioka during the independence era.
The graffiti crowd still prefers text, it’s why they call themselves writers, but their vocabulary is limited. You ask most of them what they write, and often it’s their own name. But you’ll see a lot of political graffiti too, especially in KL. The straight-forward answer for why is because it’s the capitol – if you want government agencies to hear you, they’re right there. Anywhere else wouldn’t be as efficient.
Penang is more accepting of non-political street art because we’re the city that kicked off the Malaysian art movement. It started when the British had painting clubs, and they were quite exclusive, because the British artists were housewives and the locals were barbarians. Only Western art was valued, and only one Malaysian was allowed in because he knew a housewife. The Chinese had their own arthouse. It’s why they have the oldest water colour society here. The Chinese merchants, their children, can afford traditional education so they started with water painting but have transitioned to Western styles.”
In Malaysia, not everything that stains stays, and not everything painted over disappears. A comic artist draws manga characters because faith tells him to, a graffiti artist shrugs off legality in between pay stubs, a curator tracks time as before and after COVID, a poet writes on sheetmetal to reach people who’ve stopped reading, and all the while a fine artist strives to create uniquely Malaysian art.
These people aren’t just artists. They are cartographers of public memory, watching as crowds ebb and flow like tidewater, tracing what matters in a country where the line between art, survival and rebellion is blurred in colour. If graffiti is vandalism, then so is forgetting. And here, at least, the streets remember.
