Shanghai, Painted Trains and a Thought of Zurich

1 November 2025 · 22:10 · Kinky

Shanghai – 1 November 2025, 22:10. A noodle bar near the Huangpu, a vegetarian bowl, my sketchbook drying next to it after an afternoon of rain.

Trains on the wall

This afternoon I went to a graffiti exhibition here – canvases, sketchbooks, letters from all over the world, and one long wall of photographs of painted trains. I stood there longer than anywhere else. Of course I did. I grew up with trains like that rolling past our crowded apartment in New York, and I painted a few cars in the Bronx myself before I knew what a garden chair K was.

A train is a strange canvas. It is huge, it moves, and it is gone in a few seconds. The photos are often all that remains.

A thought of Zurich

Standing there, I thought of home – our other home. Zurich has its own train legends: the VTO crew, who came into the Swiss scene in the 1990s, when Swiss graffiti moved from walls to trains. Graffiti Review calls them Switzerland's very own graffiti supergroup and credits them with the country's first double-decker whole train. Their veterans still share three decades of photos on Instagram under the motto "#realtrainshavewindows".

Painting trains is illegal, in Switzerland and almost everywhere else, and our crew paints walls where the owner says yes. But you can't tell the story of graffiti without the trains. I'm telling VenRod to put VTO on his study list – DeeNice will agree, she always does when it's about history.

Some art you can only see in photos. That makes the photos part of the art. – Kinky

The Klitty Crew is a comic universe – all stories, meetings and events on this blog are fiction. Real artists, magazines and places only appear as inspiration; no real meetings, statements or endorsements are implied.