[Cityscapes] Graffiti's rise on Korea's streets, walls, trains

Crude graffiti is drawn to insult someone in an urban renewal zone in Suwon in February 2015.

By Ron Bandun

With the recent case of Hideyes, who defaced a chunk of the original Berlin Wall on display in Seoul, graffiti has made mainstream headlines here.

It may be hard to believe now, but that particular culture of spray paint and tagging is a relatively new phenomenon in Korea. Sure you could find restaurants where customers were encouraged to write on the walls, but street art graffiti was rare ― even in Hongdae, where today nearly every surface now is as tagged up as a toilet stall.

Just like the Berlin Wall, graffiti entered Korea from outside, brought in by foreigners coming here to work and Koreans who spent time abroad. Another thing that arrived the same way was urban exploration, which is more my thing.

The two have similarities in locations, philosophy and technique, but then there is a sharp dropoff. Urban explorers eschew all forms of property damage, which includes graffiti. Graffiti causes damage, it carries legal risk, and we just don't get why anyone would feel entitled to essentially autograph property that isn't theirs.

A tag by local graffiti artist DIMZ is on cargo doors in the Wangsimni area in July 2009.

I have known other urban explorers who also tag things. I used to go exploring with one tagger about 10 years ago, and he knew to compartmentalize the two activities; if the police caught us trespassing and he had spray paint, that's extra trouble. He told me taggers like him had their own sense of ethics, following rules such as never tagging residential buildings ― although there were plenty of other taggers who had no such apprehensions. Once, he was caught tagging a building in Hongdae area and injured himself while escaping.

Most of the graffiti I saw when I started out exploring in Korea came in the form of hired goon graffiti. They would leave skulls or threatening messages on buildings in urban renewal zones, as part of a campaign to terrify evictees into leaving. Some of the worst I saw was at Yongsan District 4, the site of the Yongsan Disaster on Jan. 20, 2009, where graffiti imagery included castration and lynching.

Graffiti by hired goons is seen on Nov. 16, 2008, near the site of the Yongsan Disaster which happened on Jan. 20, 2009. / Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar

Sometime after that, graffiti artists began visiting similar abandoned neighborhoods, taking the opportunity to tag buildings slated for destruction. To me, this seemed like kicking the remaining evictees when they're down, and only served to help the hired goons.

In one case, at Wangsimni New Town, I saw where a conflict between hired goons and supporters of the evictees had played out. Mural artists drew several lovely pieces on walls in the vicinity of an evictee protest office, and taggers defaced the hired goon graffiti, covering it with words such as "kkang-pae" (gangster). The hired goons struck back by defacing the nice murals. It was a battle to degrade the neighborhood, and the hired goons were winning at nearly every step of the way.

Graffiti in the urban renewal zone for Wangsimni New Town mimics its surroundings and explores themes of gentrification, in June 2009.

While I have very little faith street art can help in urban renewal conflicts, I was initially hopeful when mural villages started appearing in old slums across Korea. The idea of mural villages is preservation through beautification and added artistic value, which increase public attention, improving residents' security and property values. But a quick visit to Seoul's Ihwa Mural Village in Daehangno or Ant Village in Seodaemun shows the mural artworks may slow progress, but they don't save the communities.

A mural village faces demolition in southern Seoul in February 2017. The red letters indicate "removal."

Around 2014, someone claiming to be a Latvian urban explorer contacted me via a throwaway Facebook account, saying he was interested in subway tunnels, of which I know many. He refused to show me his work over the internet, so I declined to share any sensitive information until we could meet in person.

"Im surprised that its not a really big deal if they spot u there [in an active subway tunnel], if ur not having things on u that u shouldn't have," he wrote.

"They would if you had spray paint or something," were my last words to him.

I never met him but two other friends did on separate occasions, and both confirmed he was a subway tagger who carried a portfolio of his work. He was later arrested in May 2015 but released due to a lack of evidence.

He was the first of many, as foreign taggers ― mostly from Europe and Australia ― were systematically coming to Korea, breaking (not merely trespassing) into subway infrastructure and tagging trains parked in depots. They would then flee the country before immigration could use CCTV footage to identify them, and the trains would be washed clean before entering service. Between Nov. 11, 2013 and May 3, 2015, Seoul Metro reported 23 cases, carried out at only 11 stations. Guro Station on Line 1 was an early target, and Wangsimni Station on lines 2, 5, Gyeongui-Jungang and Bundang was the most popular, hit five times.

This repetition suggested to me all these taggers were collaborating; maybe they had their own secret members' club with an online database holding all their secrets, just like our urban exploration community had.

This started to make headlines, as it hadn't happened before and it really was an incomprehensible crime, being simultaneously pointless and disrespectful, and it was done by foreigners. I'm told by one friend overseas that taggers saw Korea as a new frontier, where there was very little existing graffiti, almost no police enforcement and relatively light punishment compared to the whole region.

It took a few years before police managed to catch any of them. They caught two Russians in Daegu in October 2016. In April 2017, one genius came here, tagged a train and escaped on a flight to Japan, but then was dumb enough to be caught on a stopover in Incheon on his way back to Australia. Then in July that year, police managed to catch two British taggers before they left the country. They had been tagging "SMT," known to be a notorious U.K. tagger crew, but they claimed their tags were unrelated to that SMT ― because why would they lie about that?

Subway tagging doesn't make as many headlines as it used to, but mainly because the novelty has worn off in the Korean press, not because it has stopped.

Graffiti is becoming a legitimate art in Korea, which is good. But while increased artistic expression is not a bad thing, some forms of property damage will never be good. For that reason, I hope they throw the book at this Hideyes kid, or we'd better get comfortable fast with seeing some kid painting their name on the side of Namdaemun.

A wall mural is made in Mullae-dong in May 2015.

Ron Bandun is a self-described "anarchaeologist."