In Singapore a Street Artist is Harshly Charged

While we love spending our days tooling around the streets looking at Street Art and various expressions of creativity and otherwise, we readily recognize that there is no unanimity of opinion that clearly defines the line between art and vandalism – and sometimes people can get heated in their position on the topic.

Screen grabs from a video on Channel News Asia of stickers attributed to The Sticker Lady.

So as a point of reference, it’s helpful to see that in places like Singapore a young woman slapping some humorous stickers around her city is now in the slammer for a few years.  Clearly, that would be considered extreme for most of the world and according to Melissa Chong at Channel News Asia and Tan Weizhen at Today Online, many Singaporeans question the sort of penalty that is being levied. And as artists and fans increasingly communicate via the Internet around the world, there is at least one online petition with about 14,000 signatures, and many have taken to chat rooms and Facebook to argue leniency for The Sticker Lady.

Naturally, there is also a hashtag on Twitter to continue the conversation: #freestickerlady. A quick review shows that the majority of the tweets posted are in favor of taking it easy on the artist, including.

“Can’t we all appreciate a bit of humour, the Singaporean way? The stickers didn’t harm nor offend anyone. We liked them!”, and “Have you seen some of the cheesy bus shelter / train ads by the Gov? Those honestly feel like vandalism to me.”

It can be illuminating to see a how an act regarded as hardly noteworthy or at the worst an annoyance in one city is considered a severely punishable offense elsewhere. Think we’ll stay in Brooklyn for the moment, where the streets are a continually convulsing crowdsource-curated cacophony.

Press To Time Travel. Via Yahoo News. (Photo © Nicholas Ta…)

Here are a couple more links, one from Yahoo news and one from Huffington Post.

 

238
138
45