KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 25 — If you have taken in the sights around town, chances are you’ve come across many cute and colourful urban murals and graffiti artworks.
While some may already be familiar with him, the creative mind behind these artworks is the 37-year-old Sabah-born Kenji Chai.
His artwork not only colours up parts of Malaysia, but he also has work featured in other countries.
Born and raised in the city of Sandakan, Chai spent most of his childhood combing through comics, cartoons and storybooks.
He slowly developed interest in drawing and painting and eventually started his career as a graphic designer.
But soon found himself bored by the insipid nature of his job and decided to venture into graffiti in 2006 to freely express his emotions through art.
“While working as a graphic designer, I realised that I couldn’t freely express my thoughts in the artwork as it was just a job and I had to follow guidelines given by the clients,” he said.
“Therefore, I decided to take the risk of leaving my fulltime job to pursue my passion and share my artworks with a broader audience.”
For Chai, graffiti is more than just spritzing a bunch of spray cans on the wall.
“Well, it takes lots of time, planning and dedication to first sketch the design on a piece of paper before putting up the full-blown art on the wall.”
He immerses himself in each project that he gets, working from day to night to get things right.
When he is not working on a project, he prefers to travel to find inspiration for his upcoming projects.
His works include the use of vibrant characters with his main medium being graffiti combining elements of nature, positive energy, animals and layers of hidden messages for various social groups.
“Nature is the most important element for me and I try to portray that in almost all my artworks in the hope of educating people about the importance of nature preservation.”
To help raise awareness about marine pollution among Australians, Chai was invited to Brisbane, Australia last year to paint a large mural highlighting the environmental issues.
His work also includes a cute signature dog called Chaigo, which can be seen along the streets of Brisbane, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mongolia, Madrid, China and many other places.
“The signature art is actually a portrayal of a stray dog called Chaigo which is a portmanteau with my surname ‘Chai’ and ‘Go’ which is dog in Cantonese,” he said.
Chai said the stray dog symbolises his inner self as he comes from a broken family and had to be independent and strong while growing up — similar to stray dogs.
Apart from his signature dog graffiti, Chai is also behind many of other outstanding murals around Kuala Lumpur.
Among his works are the famous chicken mural on the Nando’s building near Petaling Street and the gigantic Red by Sirocco mural on the Menara M101 Dang Wangi, which got into the Malaysia Books of Records for the tallest mural in the country.
In the spirit of the Chinese New Year and the Year of the Pig, Chai in collaboration with a few other local artists painted various pig murals around the Bangsar area.
To date, Chai has also collaborated with multiple well-known brands including Tiger Beer, Puma, Netflix, Starbucks and Nippon Paint to name a few.
He has also been invited to over 20 countries around the world for various mural projects.
