In Seoul’s backstreets, Mr. Tongue turns a fleeting mark into a citywide language of faith and free art

For the observant resident or traveler, the thing that most frequently catches the eye in Seoul may not be a famous landmark or a cluster of teenagers dancing to K-pop in a plaza, but the image of a tongue — the signature motif of the graffiti artist known as… Mr. Tongue.

The artist, who has largely remained in the shadows, has put up several hundred street pieces across Seoul and other cities in Korea. Hailing from the United States and based here for more than a decade, he prefers to let the work introduce him beyond that, remaining anonymous throughout his career.

The image of the tongue was born in New York in 2010, in a city that Mr. Tongue found gray, dull and hard in the way New York famously is. He had drawn since childhood and written graffiti for years — all of it letter-based, which had begun to feel like a dead end.

“For me, I always felt a certain limitation when it came to letters, because it’s hard to deliver a certain message if you are just writing your name, just writing letters,” Mr. Tongue said during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily. “There’s so much intricacy and detail in that, but for me personally, that’s not what caught my attention. What caught my attention was using an iconic symbol or character to portray a certain message to the public.”

What was around him at the time made the case. JR, the French artist, was pasting portraits blown up to the size of buildings, overnight and without permission. Banksy was deep in his rat period. The placements, the colors, the repetition of a single mark across a city — that was the lesson.

Arriving at the tongue was a process of elimination. Mr. Tongue wanted expression, and expression meant the face, so he went down the list: eyes, nose, eyebrows, ears. Each felt as limited as a letter. The mouth brought him to the Rolling Stones logo, which had the right instinct but read to him as too feminine in its lips; the teeth said almost nothing.

“And then I came to the tongue, and I started researching the tongue, because I saw the simplicity of it but also the complexity of it,” he said.

He drew a first version on a Post-it note — nothing like what it has since become — and started placing it on mugs, televisions and refrigerators, to see how it behaved. Even without a face, the tongue was doing something an eye could not: witty, playful, or in-depth, depending on where it landed. Research followed, first into the biology, then the spiritual, which is where it locked.

The tongue is capable of speech, appetite, mockery, aggression and prayer, and over 15 years it has moved between them. At the start it was speech, loudly. A friend once told Mr. Tongue that during his most active period of "bombing" — painting illegally, in volume and at scale — it looked less like painting than shouting.

“[My friend] said it looks like you’re screaming, but it seems like now, now that I've made a slow transition, it seems like now ‘you're okay with a gentle whisper,’” Mr. Tongue recalled. “And so when my friend said that, that really sparked something in me.”

The whisper takes more patience than the scream. Mr. Tongue scouts locations days and sometimes months in advance, and once there he waits — until a car or a pedestrian passes by, for hours if that is what the wall requires. This wasn't a change of temperament, not a natural virtue. He used to go, do it and leave, spectators be damned. The waiting is what lets the work continue. 

Where the tongue goes, which locations he chooses to paint, is a decision he makes alone and privately. Mr. Tongue is a Christian believer, and it is his faith that tells him which wall is the one. Which walls that process produces is unusual. Artists usually want the most visible surface with the heaviest traffic. Mr. Tongue often ends up in front of a moldy wall in the corner of a backstreet, and takes it.

“I really believe in the power of free art,” he said. “But in order for art to be truly free, it has to be in your everyday walk. Even if an entry fee is free, you have to pay for a taxi ride or gas to get there — or even if somebody dropped you off, it's still your time, and time is money.”

A piece encountered on the way to the convenience store is, by Mr. Tongue’s account, the only kind that is actually free. A main street wall piece may last 10 years and an alley one just a week; he is not prepared to say what that week did for the people who passed it. 

Although Mr. Tongue painted in any spot that his faith chose in the early days of his career, now — as an established street artist — he paints in legally allowed spaces and private properties upon commission.

Mr. Tongue’s reading of the city of Seoul has changed more than anything else. For years he was too focused on announcing his existence to look around; it could have been Seoul, it could have been Busan. Now he can tell the neighborhoods apart by their stations and their color sense. A piece in Jung District in central Seoul, on the road running toward Myeongdong, was pitched for tourists — it was intricate, subtle and flowing rather than aggressive. A piece in Nowon District, northern Seoul, where Seoul stops and the mountains start, used greens and blues for water and trees, pink and yellow for the light hitting them — the colors the neighborhood already knows.

The artist treats Seoul’s visual density — the signage, the cables, the vents — as material rather than as an obstacle. Early on, Mr. Tongue squeezed into the nooks left between air conditioning units and bus stop signs, sometimes matching his colors so the piece half-disappeared: a lighter blue beside a blue trash bin, green on a wall behind trees. The current approach reverses that. In a visually quiet neighborhood, he uses a complex design to draw the eye. In a chaotic one, he strips it down until the simplicity is what stands out.

Mr. Tongue is equally deliberate about the separation between himself and the persona, which he has protected since before the first tongue went up. He has watched other artists get absorbed by the identities they built, and he thinks about athletes — how an injury or age takes away not just a career but a self.

“I have to just kind of keep telling myself that this is not who I am, this is what I do,” he said. “Other people automatically assumed it was my identity, because people assume this is who you want to be. But actually this was just my channel.”

The motif itself has never felt like a cage. When a subject resists the tongue, he treats that as evidence of his own limitations rather than the tongue’s — the piece in northern Seoul after the invasion of Ukraine, a peace sign in Ukrainian colors, came of refusing to slap the motif onto a flag. It is, to his surprise, still running.

On the state of the graffiti scene in Korea, Mr. Tongue is blunter than one might expect. The activity level has gone down, not up, and more artists have taken the commercial, safer route than a decade ago. The exhibitions that now exist are largely organized by the artists themselves, which he does not see as a sign of health.

“That’s how much lack of support we actually have,” Mr. Tongue said. “The artists themselves have to put on events, rather than organizations putting it on and inviting the guests. There’s a lot of logistics that go on that are a lot more complicated, and it takes away the artists from being true artists.”

Enforcement has hardened over the same period, which he connects to the country’s rising profile: the more Korea is looked at, the more graffiti is read as an attack on the image. He thinks the real objection is simpler than reputation — it's that this is the one thing on the street that cannot be controlled, which is more or less the definition of the form.

The piece Mr. Tongue thinks about most is one that no longer exists — a large work on a water tower visible from the Gangbyeon Expressway, up about a year before someone painted it out. He had placed it above another artist’s work without touching it, a gesture of respect he picked up from Shepard Fairey, who goes around another artist’s work or skips the wall. When Mr. Tongue’s work on the water tower was covered, the work below it was left untouched.

The title he had given the work was “Babel,” after the tower in Genesis of the Bible that people built out of arrogance to reach God.

“I knew that piece was going to run for 10, 20, 30 years,” he said. “So I was like, okay, I’ve secured a spot in Seoul that you can see from the highway for as long as this tower exists. And basically the mentality was, I’m going to be the most superior guy in all of Seoul.”

He could not have answered that honestly a few years ago. A reckoning of sorts came after a fall through the roof of a second-story building while painting in Indonesia, which left him with scratches and no broken bones, and then three months of holding a can and finding that nothing came out. In the ordinary course of things, a buffed piece is answered by covering someone else’s, and that cover by another, until it stops being about the wall at all. Mr. Tongue, however, is at peace with the people who painted over his. He knows them.

Erasure is the game in any case: landlords change, neighborhoods are demolished, and an artist who took each one personally would not last. What has lasted is the readership. Visitors here for a few months or a few years have told him that running into the tongue on a commute, or on a trip to Jeju, became a kind of companionship in a lonely stretch. Others hunt for pieces across districts in small groups, comparing finds like real-life Pokémon Go.

Mr. Tongue recently finished a five-year project, not yet public, painting in every city in Korea — most of which have never had street art of any kind, where people stop to watch and occasionally pick up a can just to hold it. He is not planning to repeat the project. He would rather it made someone else restless.

“Let me be the example, so that the youth in these different cities can see it, and maybe it sparks an idea — ‘Hey, I want to paint,’” he said. “There are so many talented, skillful creatives out here. They just don’t know exactly how, or what they even want to do.”

If his images, now a representative part of Seoul’s — and Korea’s — streets, can inspire that way, Mr. Tongue would be content.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]