TRANSIENT BEAUTY

There’s an odd emotion that hits me as I gaze upon Ernest Zacharevic’s works of art, one afternoon in Penang under the blazing overhead sun. It’s that profound sense of loss. The flaking faded paintings before me lies in a nest of clustered pre-war buildings along a narrow street. A joyous little boy with an outline sketch of a dinosaur on a leash plays side by side along another pensive boy wearing an unstrapped motorcycle helmet, seated atop a real motorcycle — an extant architectural feature set up against the faded red wooden door of a crumbling

Chinese shop lot.

The images themselves are painstakingly painted directly onto the wall and door. As the years pass by, they seem to grow more translucent, as if to blend and dissolve right into the peeling walls before the eyes of thousands of tourists who throng the narrow roads of Penang in search of the Lithuanian street artist’s famous pieces. The locations of his works on the walls of atmospheric shophouses in the inner city of Penang have been transformed into legitimate tourist destinations, complete with long queues for selfies and dedicated souvenir stalls.

Yet it’s the nagging sense that these paintings were not made to last forever that makes me sad.

“Street art is by its nature ephemeral and often it exists for just a few days; sometimes just a few hours, but very seldom longer,” explains Holly Harger, executive director of the ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. Just weeks later after my encounter with Zacharevic’s art, I’m here to experience Art from the Streets, which traces 40 years of street art, from its countercultural beginnings to its extraordinary rise as a major phenomenon in contemporary art. The exhibit has been curated by street art expert and writer Magda Danysz.

The leitmotif of street art, she says, is to provide instant but transient enjoyment. The purpose of street scrawls, murals and masterpieces is to exist within the everyday development of the place they inhabit. Street art isn’t intended to survive. The clue is in the name of a movement that began as a visual, creative protest.

Street art usually exists for only as long as the surrounding environment will allow it and artists like Zacharevic understand that. “I’m kind of happy for them to disappear,” he admitted to Lonely Planet. “I’m just as much a spectator as everybody else.” Honor Harger

From early prehistoric cave paintings and inscriptions on the walls of Pompeii, to Chinese dazibao and graffiti — coined from the Italian verb ‘to scratch’ — street art in all its eclectic forms has emerged and reappeared throughout history and across civilisations.

Some of the earliest expressions of street art were certainly the graffiti which started showing up on the sides of subway trains and walls in the late 20th century. Street art then often referred to guerrilla artwork on inner city walls and train lines, a movement popularised in the late 60s and 70s. One of the earliest forms of graffiti was “tagging,” or the use of elaborate typography to encode the painter’s name on the sides of buildings or subway cars. The artists’ skills were determined by evaluating control of the spray paint and developing their unique typographical marks.

It was also during a time when street art served as a way for disenfranchised groups of citizens to express their dissatisfaction with society. Street art hasn’t always been accepted as the norm. For many years, it was synonymous with vandalism, causing many artists to use it as a form of expressive rebellion. As the 90s era saw a significant rise in street art around the world, it has since remained a popular mode of expression particularly with regards to social issues.

“In 1975, graffiti was a shorthand way of accessing the mood of the time,” says writer Jon Savage in his 1992 history of punk, England’s Dreaming. “Graffiti was like a secret code, the voice of the underdog. It was people telling you things you couldn’t read in mainstream media and wouldn’t necessarily think about.”

Essentially an illegal activity, a process of creation through destruction began its evolution into numerous forms of artistic expression which eventually found its way to galleries and the global art market. Although still considered subversive and frowned upon by authorities, politicians and affluent communities at large, art enthusiasts have strived to ensure that street art earns its place in the contemporary art world. “Street art often has a loud rebellious voice of its own,” adds Harger with a smile.

The large colourful canvas of colourful explosions and lines grabs my attention. “This particular piece here is historically significant,” reveals Harger. Iconic street artist Futura began painting in the New York subways during the 70s and soon developed his own abstract graffiti style he termed as “futuristic”. “He wasn’t just interested in ‘tagging’ his name but wanted to work with colour and form. When we look at an image like this, it calls to mind some of the great works of modern art like Kandinsky. It certainly has a very different style to what we might have been seeing in subway stations,” she says.

The pioneering American artist, adds Harger, helped define the graffiti movement of the early 1970s by moving it away from