Three years after Vancouver police, city and business leaders visited the oldest Chinatown in North America, a VPD officer is drawing on what he learned in San Francisco to help restore vibrancy to Vancouver’s Chinatown neighborhood.
“Some of the things I brought back is the murals,” Const. Freddy Lau told Global News.
Artist Laura Kwok finished her mural at 269 East Pender Street on Tuesday, featuring peach blossoms, rain and a koi fish in the centre.
“It’s supposed to be a symbol of perseverance and resilience and hope,” she said.
Her dreamscape design is one of the first four artworks in ‘Project Muralize,’ an initiative Lau has spearheaded with the goal of bringing pride and colour back to Chinatown.
“I used to come down here as a kid.” Lau said.
“The smells, the sounds, it was a very vibrant type of energy, and since I’ve been on the police and work in this area, I found that it’s very, very different.”
Lau knows many merchants are dealing with repeat graffiti tagging while already struggling to keep their businesses open.
“Most of those gates are vandalized every two to three days. They paint it over, come back over the weekend, it’s vandalized again,” he said.
After touring San Francisco’s Chinatown with the Vancouver delegation in late August and early September 2022, Lau noticed graffiti was hard to find, while murals were everywhere.
“When the murals go up, a lot of people have mutual respect for public art and don’t deface them,” he said.
Before Lau joined the Vancouver Police Foundation-funded trip to examine the revitalization of San Francisco’s Chinatown, herbal merchant Tommy Wong was so tired of his Gore Avenue storefront being defaced that he wrote back to the taggers in frustration, challenging them to do better with their lives.
The Chung Shan Trading Company operator’s message inspired street artists Smokey D and the late Trey Helten to design and paint a mural for Wong’s shutter and another with Chinese characters on the gates of the neighbouring barber shop.
Aside from a few touch ups, both murals have remained unblemished since they went up in June 2022.
Lau hopes his beautification initiative, funded by the Vancouver Police Foundation, will reduce graffiti and vandalism, especially for merchants who cannot afford to commission artists on their own.
Among the murals completed so far, a nod to nostalgic Chinese culture on the gates of Chu Chu Chinatown Art shop at 247 Keefer Street, and a Lapu Lapu tribute by a Filipino artist at 530 Main Street, bridging phoenix wings of two legendary birds from Filipino and Chinese mythology.
At 536 Main Street, Carson Ting’s ‘Go North’ piece on Cheung Sing Herbal & Birds Nest Co.’s storefront portrays a hybrid creature: part East Van’s iconic crow and part rabbit, skateboarding up Main Street toward the mountains.
Hidden in the artwork are red Chinese lucky envelopes, three marked with the characters for five, three, and six, referencing the store’s address and three showing the number eight as a symbol of prosperity. The triple eights are also an homage to Ting’s late father’s licence plate when they lived in Toronto.
Translating Cantonese from a conversation he had with the herbal business owner on Wednesday, Lau said Ting’s mural has not been touched since it was painted in mid-July.
“When there’s graffiti, it’s the broken window effect,” Ting told Global News.
“Where you are a given a permission to continue the decay and the demise of an environment, but when there’s a piece that’s properly planned and properly painted, I think there is a sense of social order and I think that’s really important.”
Tracy To of Forum Home Appliances said some business owners feel defeated when they have to constantly remove unwanted graffiti, and she’s hopeful the unwritten code of not writing over someone else’s work will be upheld.
“He’s turning chaos into beauty,” said To of Lau’s efforts.
“People are coming and they’re saying, ‘Oh this is really cool’ and they want to take photos with it rather than the graffiti that was on the gates before.”
Kwok’s mural was inspired by her maternal grandfather, who came to Canada in the 1960s and built up a business by himself, merging eastern traditional values with western culture.
“My grandfather isn’t with me anymore but just to have that little piece of him in this mural is kind of special,” Kwok said.
Lau wants to see at least 10 murals up by the end of the summer, with plans to have QR codes on each to allow people to learn the meaning behind them — but his long-term ambitions are even bigger.
“Eventually I want to do all the shutter gates in Chinatown,” he said.