The gigantic street art installation is complete!

I suppose the people who did this may come by to add some more details and what not. I can't really say because although I do admire this sort of art, I cannot actually do any of it myself so I'm not sure.

It does look wonderful though and if I was going to be a bit fussy about any of it it would be that the sides of it kind of look like the same crud that is all over the world with the artists having some sort of unique tag that is just their call sign or something. I would have preferred if they had made some more paintings of some sort of local culture stuff rather than making it about themselves with their call signs or whatever that is even named.

But still, it is a vast improvement over the junk that was on there before and I am really happy that these guys who own the building paid the artists to do this and I hope it catches on with the rest of the neighborhood.

A few years back an unofficial graffiti park was opened nearby where I live and there was a small coffee shack in the middle of it. People could come by and have a $1 iced coffee and watch to see how exceptionally time consuming doing something like real street art actually is and how the people who are doing it need a plan on paper. They don't just run up on a location and start spraying. There's a lot of math and planning involved and once you see that in action, it gives you a much better appreciation for the talent levels that are necessary to do something like this.

I'm hopeful that whoever owns that unused plot of land beside this hotel would maybe allow another coffee shack to set up shop but I was talking to someone that other day that said that the land on the other side of that fence belongs to a high ranking member of the Vietnamese military and that they are really jerks about what sort of business they will allow nearby. I would imagine one that always smells like aerosol paint would be on the "no no list."

I overheard the landowner speaking with the artists when he was commissioning them to do the work and the owner apparently only wanted the picture in the middle initially but the artists informed him that in order to prevent other people from coming along and putting garbage tags on the building, they needed to be allowed to cover the entire wall. The idea being that street artists respect other street artists and will not paint over other people's work. This does seem to be the case at least here in Da Nang because there are murals at various places in the city that have been up there for years and nobody has ever painted over them or added to them. Once the space is claimed by one artist, it seems as though the others will leave it alone.

I find this honor among thieves kind of fantastic because in most cases, the people who are making these things are breaking the law by even doing it, yet they have a level of respect inside of their ranks that is self-governing. Nobody is going to ever force them to not paint over someone else's work, but yet they still never do it.

This is a vast improvement to the area and now I just hope that perhaps it could become a theme for this neighborhood and I would welcome it because I live here and love this sort of stuff.

There are other parts of town where the walls are just covered in shite pieces that were done very rapidly to avoid the police I"m guessing. But when a talented artist knows that he or she can do their work without fear of getting in trouble, their real abilities truly shine.