Killamari - Atlanta Street Art Map

Killamari

Rod Ben (aka Killamari) is a member of the Lotus Eaters Club artist collective and the recipient of the 2019 Laura Patricia Calle Grant from Living Walls. In March of 2021, Killamari was kind enough to answer a few questions for the Atlanta Street Art Map.

Every superhero has an origin story. Tell us yours.

My mother was a refugee from Vietnam, and my father was a soldier from Cambodia who was training in Columbus, Georgia when the Khmer Rouge took over the capital in Cambodia, and he got stuck here. They met, fell in love, and moved to Atlanta. My pops worked at a gas station near the Varsity and went to Georgia Tech. My mom worked at a rug factory and Salvation Army to help pay for my father’s tuition. Somewhere down the line they got to making me and my sister and we moved up to DC where my pops got a gig. It was there I was exposed to graffiti on my walks to school, comics in the Vietnamese bodega slash antique store, and Saturday morning cartoons. My parents worked a lot and my sister was too cool to hang out with me, so I was often left to my own devices. There was a big rivalry between the Latin and Asian gangs in my neighborhood, so getting to and from school was often a very violent experience. A lot of things were kind of crazy back then, but art was my escape. Art kept me out of trouble, until I got into graffiti when I was older. I haven’t put the pencil down since.

How did you get your Killamari moniker?

I was hanging out with my buddy Camille and my sketchbook one day, just doodling. I drew this little grim reaper dude and his cloak had tentacles coming off of it. She was watching me draw and was like “Yo, that’s a KILLAMARI not a CALAMARI.” Hah, and that was pretty much it. I dug it and been running with the name ever since. I was 18 at the time, and that was 18 years ago.

What would you like everyone to know about Khmer Culture and how does it influence your artwork?

I’d say that our culture is not just Pol Pot and the Killing Fields. It is what we’re most known for, and the struggles and the healing is definitely part of the experience but we’re more than that. Khmer culture is very old and rich, the food is great, the art is ancient, the pre genocide music scene was rad as fuck. I haven’t found a lot of Khmer Americans in the art scene so I try to rep the culture in my art where I can. It’s impossible to sum it up, so I’d just recommend to anyone reading to do the research, Cambodia is very interesting and cool.

Your subjects range from cute animals, to monsters, to real people. How do you choose your subjects?

Man, it’s just whatever I’m feeling at the moment. It could be because I just watched a certain cartoon, or heard a random song, or saw someone really interesting on the street. Sometimes I’m researching something on the internet and go down an internet rabbit hole cause I came across something interesting. I did that with Axolotls for a while. So yeah, I guess that’s why my subjects are all over the place, rabbit holes. Now I want to draw rabbits.

Your website features a drawing saying “I am not a virus”. What is the story behind this piece?

This is a heavy one for me, but I’ll try to keep it short ish. So first off, anti-Asian racism in this country is nothing new, but I do think that experience is relatively invisible to most people. You only really hear about the struggles of the Latino and Black communities in the media, and on top of that Asians get labeled as the “Model Minority”. Which is bullshit and all it does is create a wedge between us minorities. I’ve never once in my life been treated like a Model Minority, I’ve only ever been treated as a person who is anything but White. So yeah fast forward to 2020, and take all the already existing anti-Asian sentiment, and then sprinkle it with a president who calls Covid-19 the “China Flu” or “Kung Flu”. The result is Asian Americans like myself, who was born here, being blamed for the pandemic. I’ve received hate mail for being Asian, someone try to pepper spray me in front of a store, and the saddest one for me was watching a dozen parents stare at me and my daughter and say “we have to go now” as they remove their children from where my daughter was playing even though they were perfectly fine with letting the other kids play together before we walked up. And that’s all pretty light compared to other cases. People have been beaten, stabbed, shot, had acid dumped on them, even our elderly and kids have been attacked or murdered. It’s all messed up. Just for being Asian. So yeah, that illustration is a reflection on that. I am not a virus and attacking our community is not your vaccine.

What do you like about painting murals as opposed to other media?

I love the physical aspect of it. Murals are my Tai Chi in the park. I like the big gestures that require me to hold my breath and use my whole body. Even if it gets physically exhausting it never feels like work. I’ll take painting a mural over sitting at a desk any day.

In an Instagram post you said “I wanted to rep all walks of life” in your two Living Walls murals recently painted in Decatur. That’s a tall order. How did you approach this task?

I wanted to paint characters that were representative of different races, sexual preferences, and identities. Obviously that’s a lot to try to portray but I chose little details here and there that were interesting to me. For example, color played an important roll for me in these two murals. For one wall I took the color yellow, which is associated with the color of Asian people, and mixed that with the red, white, and blue of the American flag. The resulting colors was the palette I used to paint the first mural. The act of mixing the colors as well as the visual impact of the resulting mixture was my metaphor of blended or multi racial communities. For the second wall I chose the colors from the Pan-Sexual flag because I wanted the mural to be welcoming and accepting of anyone no matter their identity.