2016 Street Art

art58koen
10 minutes ago
3 min read

Over the years, I moved from physical objects (photos, books, vinyl, CDs, etc.) more and more to digital versions (jpg, epub, pdf, mp3, etc.), and backed these up.

First by burning files on CDs, later DVDs, and finally on portable hard drives, but discovered over time that these also have a limited timespan...

*Riding along Khlong Saen Saeb street art!*

CDs/DVDs become unreadable or start skipping, and portable contraptions start developing problems (corrupting data) as well, irritating to say the least, but nothing lasts forever, I guess.

*Playing 'takraw' alongside Khlong Saen Saeb*

In this case, my 2016 backup was deep-frozen, but I managed to retrieve quite a bit of data using a rescue program.

Unfortunately, many of my detailed folders were lost, and instead, I ended up with audio, photo, and document collections.

I started browsing through the photos and found some cool street art from the past, of which most by now probably has been removed or painted over multiple times...

*Siam Square, note how the 4 public phones have become part of the mural!*

Somehow, the temporary nature of street art matched my digital backups!

And with that in mind, another blog post was born!

*Samsen 4 Alley, area, made by a vampire perhaps?*

Looking at these pix from the past brought back quite a few memories, no surprise really.

*Phayathai Road, my impression is that he drank something stronger than just beer...*

With a few I remembered immediately where I'd taken them, but not all...

Thanks to Google, I managed to find the locations of most pieces.

The ones near The Old Siam were easily identified.

Not exactly masterpieces, but still good fun enough.

The part of Khlong Saen Saeb near the Hua Chang Bridge has always been very popular among both Thai and international street artists.

On both sides of the khlong in fact!

The second Bukruk International Street Art Festival (*) took place in 2016, and Dutch artist Daan Botlek (**) painted the above piece. This background story I've told quite a few times over the years, but about 2 months ago a memory started slowly coming back...

*Daan at work with a roller and paint...*

Finally, the coin dropped, and I realized I had been there in January 2016 when Daan started painting his piece!

And while digging through my digital archive, I found 3 photos of him in action...

This made sense because I was very surprised to see him painting there, as I had never seen any street artist (neither Thai nor farang) actually painting their stuff on a wall, so I had a quick chat with him and took those photos.

He told me about the festival, but as he was busy I didn't want to disturb him much...