The God Who Protects Graffiti: How Southern Fujian Vernacular Belief Shapes a Graffiti Writer’s Spatial Strategies and Everyday Rituals

Abstract

In the everyday streets and alleys of southeastern coastal China, graffiti often appears alongside temples, incense burners, and local deities within the same urban landscape. However, related research tends to interpret the localization of graffiti as symbolic collage or aesthetic mashup, rarely exploring how these local resources function within the creator's experiential world. This article uses Moon, a graffiti artist from Quanzhou, Fujian, as a case study, based on a transcript of an in-depth interview, to discuss how Southern Fujian folk beliefs have entered the conceptual structure and creative practice of graffiti writing. In the interview, Moon does not treat "Tudigong (the Earth God)" as a cultural symbol to attract attention but rather understands it as a protective force highly relevant to street creation. Starting from the Southern Fujian belief system of "worshiping what you ask for," he connects street creation with "land," thus deducing that Tudigong is the "deity who manages graffiti," and prays to him for more walls and creative spaces in his daily worship. Furthermore, the image of Tudigong in his work is not only a personal identifier but also a way to establish a relationship with the space. Before entering a new location to create, he would first draw a Tudigong in a corner or stick a sticker on it to connect himself with that space. This paper contributes by proposing a supplementary path to understanding the localization of graffiti: local culture is not merely a decorative element "added" to a work; it can also deeply participate in the creator's sense of space, the sustainability of practice, and the choice of symbols through everyday concepts and action systems such as folk beliefs, thereby influencing how graffiti is imagined and practiced in local society.