Street Art and Murals in Ipoh
Part of the Ipoh travel guide — see every topic in All Ipoh Guides.
In 2014 the Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic — whose 2012 murals had transformed George Town's tourism two years earlier — painted a set of works on Ipoh's old town walls, commissioned around the theme of the city's own history: a paper plane, a boy on a chair, an old man drinking coffee, a hummingbird. They did for Ipoh's old town what the George Town works did for Penang's, and a larger local scene has grown around them since, along with a set of commissioned murals telling the city's tin-mining story.
The Zacharevic set
Painted on the walls of old town buildings around Jalan Sultan Yussuf, Market Lane and the surrounding streets, and mostly reachable on a twenty-minute walk. The best known show a boy in a paper plane, an old man drinking Ipoh white coffee, a girl in a window, and a hummingbird. Like the George Town works they combine paint with the actual fabric and objects of the wall. Several have faded or been retouched in the decade since; exterior paint in this climate does not last, which is part of the form.
The Mural Art's Lane
A separate project on Jalan Masjid, a lane of large commissioned murals depicting Ipoh's history — tin dredges, miners, rickshaws, the railway, coffee shops — painted by local artists in a more literal, narrative style than Zacharevic's. It is unashamedly a tourist attraction and it is genuinely informative about how the city was built. Around it and through the old town, further independent and commissioned work has accumulated, including pieces on the shutters of shops that are only visible when they are closed.
Walking it
The whole thing fits in an hour and a half on foot around the old town, and it combines naturally with the heritage buildings and Concubine Lane since they are the same few streets. Go early: the works face in all directions and the midday light in a valley city is punishing. Free maps are available from cafes and the tourist office, and the works turn over enough that a map more than two years old will be partly wrong. Buy a coffee from the shops you photograph.
Why it worked here
Ipoh's old town had the same precondition as George Town's: an intact stock of pre-war shophouses with large blank side walls, preserved by decades of economic stagnation, in a compact grid. The murals arrived at a moment when the buildings were being restored and reoccupied by cafes, hotels and small businesses, and the two together turned a quiet provincial centre into a weekend destination. Whether that is preservation or gentrification is argued locally, as it is in Penang.
Street Art and Murals at a glance
| The commission | Ernest Zacharevic, 2014 — two years after George Town |
|---|---|
| Where | Around Jalan Sultan Yussuf and Market Lane, old town |
| The other project | Mural Art's Lane, Jalan Masjid — tin-mining history |
| Walk | ~1.5 hours; go early for the light |
| Note | Works fade and are retouched — old maps go stale |
| Why here | Intact pre-war shophouses preserved by economic stagnation |