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A glorious new pack of murals designed to celebrate and brighten Chinatown is already in the works — including a giant blue dragon representing growth, renewal and benevolence.
Painted by local artistic polymath Busyrawk, The Four Guardians of Chinatown project aims to create large-scale symbolic animal paintings including The Black Tortoise of the North and The Vermillion Bird of the South — both locations TBD — and The Azure Dragon of the East.
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The in-development dragon is set to hit the east side of Mah Society of Edmonton at 9643 101A Ave. this summer.
Busyrawk is the professional artist name of Edmonton’s Young Ick Cha, born just outside of Seoul, South Korea, exactly 32 years ago this Saturday.
As a kid, Cha and his family moved to Singapore and Indonesia, the artist mostly grew up in Malaysia before heading to Montreal’s McGill University to take business.
“That was my parents’ choice,” laughs Cha, though it was here he leaned into dancing competitively, travelling to New York and getting increasingly immersed in hip-hop culture, including in Toronto.
Notably, Cha is part of the international Ready to Rock crew, which includes Edmonton’s unstoppable Matthew Creeasian.
“As I was breakdancing, I got exposed to ’80s New York subway art,” he says, noting Henry Chalfant and Marta Cooper’s landmark Subway Art book as an inspiration flow of art rising from the so-called “outside.”
You can see how all the ingredients in this wide-reaching, planetary background inform Busyrawk’s aims for his Four Guardians murals, which include goals of being culturally confident, multinational and multigenerational.
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The first gorgeous painting in the series, The White Tiger of the West, already glows with big blue eyes behind the China Marble Restaurant at 10566 97 St. — finished last year as a proof of concept.
As will each of its mystical siblings, the big cat faces one of four cardinal directions, and features poetry by Catherine Wang and William Lau, its calligraphy by Stephen Tsang.
“The White Tiger towers over the mountains/Protecting the peaceful sailing of this neighbourhood./With all its greatness,/It guards Chinatown’s safety and well-being,” reads the poem in traditional Chinese script.
The project is truly multimedia, including explanatory videos accessible by QR code made by Jordon Hon.
Surprisingly, given his near-photographic painting skill, Cha only started walking a serious visual art path after rupturing his Achilles tendon in 2022.
“My main practice was dancing, and I was so in love with it,” he explains. “I went into a dark depression as I tried to figure out what to do with my life.
“I learned a lot from that experience,” he says. “It helped me realize that a closed door also opens another door.”
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Having played around drawing video game characters as a kid, he started seriously studying drawing fundamentals online.
“I can’t say I’m a self-taught learner; I’m a self-directed learner,” says Cha.
“During COVID, I was doing basic shapes like cubes, spheres and cones, rotating them in my head and drawing them on paper at first.
“Eventually, I started drawing people,” he says.
As have many great artists, Cha noticed the way skills and mindsets can leap between disciplines.
“I think what really helped me is when I kept learning new things, I developed a part of my brain,” he explains.
“So for example, in dancing, you have to know your fundamentals to have a solid foundation to build your own style that comes over a long period of time.
“I found out art drawing is exactly the same: fundamentals are an absolute must to be a great artist.
“And sure enough, even Kung Fu was the exact same thing — just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat,” he laughs. “Wax on wax off.”
Cha made the jump to aerosol, working with master muralists Wane One and Dedos during the legendary Rust Magic International Street Mural Festival.
Last year was Busyrawk’s first mural season, painting dancer Angela Miracle Gladue — AKA Miss Chief Rocka — on a gym wall at Prince Charles Elementary School, the outdoor sign for Baiju, and numerous outdoor tribute portrait projects like Bissell Centre’s Dearly Missed and Iranian martyr Jina Mahsa Amini.
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This all leads back to the Four Guardians.
“The reason I’m doing the project,” explains Cha, “and to help rebuild that community without gentrifying it, is my parents are immigrant families that went through a lot of pain, a lot of loneliness, to provide me the privilege that I have today.”
For him, two important things about Chinatown circle both immigration and who was here before.
“One is the legacy of the early immigrant Chinese forebears who went through exclusion, and the pains of being out here a long way from home, and having a lot of federal policies that really put them in a very painful spot for a really long time,” says the artist.
“The second thing is that Canada exists on Indigenous lands, so it’s important that Chinatown is not just about Chinese architecture, or Chinese culture,” he stresses. “There’s a lot of other cultures that are involved in this community.”
Cha worked with Lau and outreach worker William Cardinal-Mawer.
“They are mentors on this project to help guide me to really make this a voice from Chinatown,” says Cha.
“I’m not saying they’re the only voice from Chinatown, but they understand that there’s so many facets, and they’re always connecting with our unhoused neighbours.
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“Including those narratives was a very big part of this project.”
If you want to help out with the next mural and the entire project, head to The Four Guardians of Chinatown at gofundme.com.
“With each new generation,” says Cha, “there’s new contexts, new ways of doing things. So it’s a matter of understanding amongst each of the generations.
“That’s what I would like to bring out.”
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Speaking of meaningful local murals, a new piece showed up on the city’s last-standing Graffiti Free Wall along the 105 Avenue LRT exit portal west of 95 Street last weekend.
A collaboration between AJA Louden, Ahmad Moussa and Tzadeka Vision, the “Once You See It You Can’t Unsee It” piece depicts a long line representing journalists killed doing their jobs in the Israel-Hamas war.
In honour of World Press Freedom Day, the mural includes the handwritten names of 97 people trying to report on the devastation over there.
A QR code on the wall leads you to New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists at cpj.org, where you can read more about the cost of being a journalist in the ongoing war.
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