Constructing an Art-Life: Tourism and Street Art in Sarawak

Abstract

How do street artists engage with multiple influences as they generate a tourist space with their distinctive art? With that poser this chapter adds a segment to the composite perspective of place-making and tourism, filtered through the eyes of muralists in an emerging destination on the South China Sea. For distinction amidst extant research, it privileges the voice of the artist as it analyses the responses from five identified streams of practice in what is relatively a young offshoot of contemporary art in the state of Sarawak, Malaysia. The contrasting experience of each practitioner fuels a discussion on influences in place making in a destinationthat is seeking connections with global tourism. Findings reemphasize that, in contrast to Western and liberal contexts, postcolonial places are relatively conservative – culturally and politically – with artists taking more cognisance of patron agendas (than their own) as they appropriate an essentially American art form. Significantly, the sense of local identity is palpable in art content. Nevertheless, and no differently, the personal voice of the artist does rise above expressions that include tagging, communicative graffiti, doodles, pop art, historio-cultural archiving, tracting, and “the self-portrait”, among others. The tourist – the last of a tripartite commissioner-agent-consumer, stake holding – absorb such expressions in the (local and international) city and in cyberspace as a composite place.