Two good street-art finds in Da Nang

Neither one of these are spray, but the are also custom and are not decals. Recently I was in a Mexican restaurant and at first I was amazed at how good their custom art was until I got up close to take a texture shot and realized that all of them were giant stickers that the owners had stuck to the walls. LAME!

Well, I found two new spots but only one of them is outdoors, but it has a good backstory.

This mural was inside of a rather high-end restaurant that recently opened up in my neighborhood. The restaurant was disappointing and overpriced but we'll get to that post at a later date.

The fun thing about this mural is that, according to the manager of the restaurant, it was already on the wall when the people took over the place. The picture was part of a pizza place that was open air that existed before they walled the place up and turned it into what it is today. They told me that it was largely their inspiration for how they decorated the restaurant and to me, this is really cool.

The next place is outdoors so it has a bit more of an authentic edge to it IMO.

This is the nighttime security gate at some gigantic tattoo parlor that is a block away from my condo. I suppose it is fitting because the shop is called "Dragon City Ink." I like the work here but I will admit that I was a bit disappointed when I got up close and saw that this is brushwork, not spray.

Even though I consider brush work to be cheating as far as street art is concerned there is no denying talent of the artist(s) who did this especially when you consider that they were also dealing with the contours of the interlocking metal pieces of the retractable door. Sown on the bottom right you can see where actual spray was used but for the most part this is clearly brush work.

It looks pretty good and thankfully nobody has come along and put up some shitty gang tag on top of it. Come to think of it, that sort of behavior doesn't often happen here so I am thinking that the people that do put crap-tags over someone else's work perhaps have some respect for the original artists.

I haven't been discovering very much street art lately but a lot of this is my own fault as I haven't been out exploring very much lately. As a whole Da Nang isn't very good for this sort of thing because the punishment for vandalism (and lets be fair, that's what this is even if you are good if you didn't have permission) in Vietnam and outside of the few street art parks that were once in this area, I have never actually seen anyone tagging anywhere.

Do you have any street art in your neighborhood? If you do I would like to see it!