Another decent street art find and some strange municipal "art"
The journey continues in this nice little area I have discovered that is about 4-5km south of all the hustle and bustle of this, what i consider to be, too busy of a city on the coast of Vietnam. Just like any area in the world that I have seen that has a high population, there is a lot of vandalism attempting to masquerade as street art, which it is not. Therefore, it is kind of nice to see that there is at least a small part of this area that at least appears to enjoy REAL street art and suppresses vandalism at the same time. In this area, which is actually quite large, I haven't noticed any crappy tags quickly done under the cover of darkness, and instead all of the street art are like well-planned murals and a few of the buildings have dedicated multiple stories of their building to making massive ones. I'll get to those later because the weather hasn't been very good lately and I am afraid to bring my phone with me on a long walk. There's a good reason for this as I have accidentally destroyed 2 phones by assuming the water resistance was a lot stronger than it actually is.
I had pointed out in the past that this house is an unusual one because they seem to truly embrace street art and must be allowing it, but at the same time it is one of the only houses I have seen with the level of security that it has around its perimeter. While bars on windows are quite common here since the police rarely do anything about property crime here, it is most unusual to see someone surround their property with a high wall complete with barbed wire on top of it. Perhaps this street art enthusiast is also extremely wealthy and has a lot of valuable stuff in their house. I'd love to meet the people one day and hopefully that can happen. With the amount of time I have been lingering around their property - while always keeping a polite distance and never sneaking around - if they are friendly I imagine they will approach me at some point.
I have been around almost this entire community and I cant fine ANY terrible tags or other vandalism, including on buildings that are partially demolished or abandoned. I don't know what keeps this community this way, but I am so enamored by this apparent community spirit that I may soon look around and see if it is possible for me to move there. I can always just travel the 4km towards the hustle and bustle of the city if need be. I constantly complain about how the "real" city is too noisy and busy, so maybe this is exactly what I need. I suppose the only issue would be that I do not have a car and I don't think many places will deliver this far out. We'll see... I'll investigate soon enough.
Now there is a rather crappy park that is nearby that was installed in the past couple of years and I saw what appeared to be a statue that was installed there so I moved in for a closer look.
At first glance I thought "wow!" and enjoyed the backdrop of the Marble Mountain tourist attraction in the background. I thought it was quite tasteful and a nice celebration of the Lunar New Year this year being the year of the dragon. But then I noticed that one of the legs was on the ground and for a moment I thought that it is terrible that someone would intentionally damage a public art installation. So I moved in a bit closer to get some more information.
I don't know if you can tell from this picture or not but this is not marble, it's not even a cement mold or plaster. It is Styrofoam. That was just seriously disappointing to me because this city claims or pretends to be really concerned about environmentalism but at the same time they would construct something like this knowing damn well that this is basically the least environmentally-friendly medium on the planet. It is within wind-distance to the ocean as well, which is where this thing will likely end up eventually.
So my initial glee at this being in this park was turned to a bit of disgust because honestly what sort of governance would simultaneously be installing recycling bins around many neighborhoods while at the same time building public art pieces out of something that is well known to be a pollutant that never breaks down and often ends up in nature.
Look back at the first picture and then imagine, that in order to make a looping dragon like that they would have needed to start with an absolutely enormous piece of foam, most of which wasn't used and presumably was just thrown out or burned.
Oh well, I'm trying to not be too judgmental about things that are done by a country that is not my own. If I were to kick up a fuss about this I would just get deported :)