There’s a certain irony in wandering through a shopping mall and stumbling across a celebration of rebellion. Between escalators and artificial plants, The Step 1 – a slightly echoey section of MMAD at MunMun Srinakarin – has been commandeered by the kind of art that usually lives outdoors, sometimes illegally, often fleetingly. For once, street culture isn’t being scrubbed off – it’s being spotlighted.
This is Wall Lords Thailand Exhibition, a loosely tethered companion to the 2025 graffiti competition of the same name. It runs until June 1 and brings together over 20 artists, including the competition’s 14 finalists, to create something temporary, collaborative and slightly unpredictable. The idea, it seems, is not to tame street art but to let it breathe without cars or rain or CCTV.
What emerges isn’t chaos, but a kind of layered quiet. The exhibition isn’t loud, though some of the work clearly wants to be. You see glimpses of protest, yes, but also nostalgia, humour, the aftermath of something unspoken. One wall offers up neat geometries in matte black; another is more hesitant, like a thought forming mid-sentence. A mural near the back plays with optical illusions. A nearby scrawl reads almost like a diary entry – private, and probably never meant to be framed.
Walking through feels less like gallery-going and more like urban daydreaming. The space doesn’t guide you, exactly. You pause when something catches your eye, not because it demands it but because there’s time to notice. It’s urban life without motion – no engines, no footfall, no need to dodge motorbikes or turn down your headphones.
Positioned so close to bubble tea counters and digital billboards, the exhibition reads like a whisper against the mall’s polished hum. The contrast is deliberate but not hostile. If anything, it invites you to sit with contradiction – rawness beside routine, impermanence inside something built to last. There’s no manifesto on the wall, no curatorial essay urging interpretation. What you get instead is a kind of shared breath, scattered across cement and canvas.
It would be easy to label it subversive, but maybe it’s just honest. A brief pause in the churn, where stories usually told in motion get a chance to stay still.