streetkonect: June 2009

SK Team: How are you?

Chinokoy 420: Fine

SK Team: How’s your graffiti?

Chinokoy 420: No lie low, graffiti is lifetime; that’s my motto.

SK Team: Where were you born?

Chinokoy 420: Tisa, Labangon

SK Team: Have you ever met a girl that became your girlfriend because of doing graffiti?

Chinokoy 420: Yes (grins)

SK Team: Have you been caught by the police?

Chinokoy 420: Yep, in Mabolo with Rotten and in another place with Payter. We finished the piece though even if there was a cop.

SK Team: You also do tattoo right?

Chinokoy 420: Yes

SK Team: What is the difference between tattoo and graffiti? Aside from the manner of execution, of course…

Chinokoy 420: Mas lingaw ang graffiti kay free! (grins) Self-expression bah…I feel horny in tattoo (laughs)

SK Team: What do you want to achieve in your career as a tattoo artist?

Chinokoy 420: I want to be able to work with Paul Booth

SK Team: Now let’s talk about the other side of you, the graffiti side…do you do graffiti for events? You know, like band gigs, etc…

Chinokoy 420: Yes of course…for the free sprays.

SK Team: Who are your influences in graffiti?

Chinokoy 420: Seventh Letter Crew (TSL), Stomp Down Killaz (SDK)

SK Team: How about in music?

Chinokoy 420: D.O.R

SK Team: Do you do throw-ups and tags?

Chinokoy 420: Yep! CR! (smiles) I was the one who de-virginized the building of CAFA in TC…

SK Team: What was the name of your first crew?

Chinokoy 420: Deadendz Crew! With Rotten…we are still hardcore.

SK Team: What can you say about the Cebu street scene?

Chinokoy 420: It’s great, but to be able to paint in the streets is harder now compared to before. It’s much tougher now.

SK Team: What do you want to achieve in the graffiti scene in Cebu?

Chinokoy 420: I want the other artists in Cebu to know what graffiti is and change their perception about graffiti, because most of them relate graffiti to vandalism. I also want them to know that the street art scene in Cebu is very much alive, and that there is a street art scene existing in Cebu.

SK Team: Do you think there is a difference between the graffiti scene here in Cebu compared to the scene in the other parts of the Philippines?

Chinokoy 420: Yes, in every wall we have varieties of style. Even if, let’s say, we write the same letters, we always try to outdo one another, which is not really a bad thing because it creates competition. It elevates the graffiti styles in the Philippines.

SK Team: Do you sketch before you paint it in the streets?

Chinokoy 420: Sometimes

SK Team: What comes first, tattoo or graffiti?

Chinokoy 420: Tattoo, but I sketched a lot of graffiti pieces before.

SK Team: What are you more comfortable doing, tattoo or graffiti?

Chinokoy 420: I am more comfortable doing tattoo, I know the procedures, that’s why (laughs) In graffiti, there are many factors you have to consider, the colors, the wall, the legality of the wall, especially the police…

SK Team: What do you plan to do next? Any shocking piece you’re planning to put in the streets?

Chinokoy 420: It depends…hehe

SK Team: Any parting words? Any “words of wisdom”?

Chinokoy 420: Support local artists!

More than a month ago, posters of Willie Revillame with the phrases, “Capitalist Whores” and “Wow pera!”, have gained for itself its own popularity among the local media and the general public.

I have to be honest in saying that I have a personal bias against works with socio-political sensibilities, but this is definitely not the case with the Willie posters. In the process of all the sensation, the posters have elicited quite a number of reactions, and to me, these reactions are quite funny.

Here's one: The media and the local authorities were quick to brand these posters “Anti-Willie”. Are they really? Not entirely, of course. It's not hard to believe, even without asking the artists themselves, that these posters were not so much an attack on Revillame as they are a commentary on the sorrowful state of the Filipino poor.

Wowowee has grown for itself a Whoever-feeds-you-is-your-God culture, and the media would not like to admit that. Instead, they accuse our street artists of being grammatically incorrect. Are the media and the authorities stupid enough not to know that the word “whores” is a noun in plural form, and therefore can not be used to describe a singular such as Willie? You may call us vandals, but we are not idiots, so FUCK YOU.

I applaud these artists for shoving in our faces the painful reality of our times, not a romanticized telling of a story that is all too common in the newspapers.

-KOC