Ephemeral exhibition

There is an underground passage near the train station where we live. It bypasses a major highway above. 

Cool in hot days, flooded in torrential rains, it witnesses its fair share of mundane events. 

Early in the morning, people are rushing to the train station, or slow moving noisy herd of girls moving in the opposite direction, going to their school, a girls’ college nearby. 

Then in the evening tired office workers, beaten by a day’s work are returning home. Every day is the same. Life is as dull as it gets under the tunnel.

With its grey walls and flickering neon lights, the tunnel is always there, unassuming, never refusing to let you go in one direction or the other, a small wormhole connecting two little universes, one end is for leaving, the other one is for coming.

This endless looking boredom is sometimes broken by an influx of graffiti. 

You can tell if graffiti are made by a herd of teenagers or a solitary artist. 

Teens leave the walls with battered mixture, an illegible cacophony of teenage outrage. Their work is similar. They attempt to show off their signature, made up in block 3d letters, cryptic words that do not mean anything, as elusive as the source of their frustration.  

The stationmaster who is responsible to look after the train station, makes occasional announcements from fixed megaphones erected around the platform. He accepts customer enquiries, warns girls not to block stairways, asks people to wear their masks, and he ensures people to know that the tunnel is his territory.

There is an ongoing arms race between graffiti artists and the stationmaster. When the ratio of graffiti and greyness reach to a certain level, he washes the walls with grey paint and graffiti disappears overnight. 

Yet something unusual breaks this tedious flow. An unknown artist we would never see or know, emerge out of darkness and start to create art. 

Unlike teenagers’ mess, the solitary artist’s artworks are distinctive, they have style and stories, they make you wonder. A few days apart, a new work is added. You can tell it is from the same artist. People using the tunnel witness a living exhibition, wondering what would be added today. This is art.  

Passers like me nervously await the day these works disappear. But unlike an exhibition in an art gallery, there is no definitive day to end it. This makes the art brutally thrilling, you need to understand the message while it lasts, until the day the stationmaster appears with his bucket full of grey paint.