What Happened to Jisoe?

In 2005, mainstream Australian discovered graff culture through the documentary Jisoe—a portrait of Melbourne-based graffiti writer Justin Hughes. The film followed Justin (Jisoe) as he sunk into an existential crisis, torn between getting a job to care for his family and continuing his “crooked,” train-bombing lifestyle to deal with the fallout of his own upbringing. The dissonance only got more complex as Jisoe’s first child was born among the wreckage of his relationship with his father.

The film pierced Australian culture by presenting a lifestyle that’s often dismissed as thuggish or brash, and reimagined it as something with genuine artistic merit. It was a unique take on the “Aussie Battler” story, and a breathing example of intellectualism that sits outside bourgeois academic fluff. That is, if philosophers attempt to understand fundamental problems around existence with reason, Jisoe addressed them through practice. He dedicated his life to decorating the stale rhythms of train lines to fill his own existential black hole.

But now Jisoe has vanished. The veins that sprawl across Melbourne—once dubbed among “the best graffitied places in the world”—now lay drained of their cultural colour.

Obviously I loved Jisoe, and I loved the film, so I’ve been wondering: where is Jisoe now? What’s he up to? Where has he been? And what are his plans for the future?

So I adventured through the boroughs of the internet (mostly just Reddit and Facebook) in search of my displaced hero. The first thing I discovered was that Jisoe wasn’t painting anymore. Instead, he’s been expressing himself through Aussie hip-hop. But according to my friend Tim, a hip-hop producer from Balwyn, “word on the streets is that he bailed on the (rap) game because it was full of sell-outs and show ponies”.

Graff images photos by Riley Aicken

The second rumour was from Matt, a guy I met on the OzHipHop forums. Matt told me Jisoe had been working as a postie for the last few years, but Matt’s theory was in conflict with other theories—like that of Doveton graffer Chris Dunce, who was adamant that Jisoe was out there somewhere working as a garbo. Others from the forums extended their theories interstate, claiming Jisoe was a FIFO labourer on the mines in WA, or he was driving trucks in Adelaide. The rest just said he was a junky, spotted on various train lines and fast food joints in the Melbourne CBD.

After almost two weeks of searching, I found the most recent photo of “Jisoe” on the Internet. It’s the one at the top of this article, taken by Thomas Ohehir late last year. Excited, I wanted to know everything and Thomas explained the encounter:

I was walking up Bourke Street Mall and saw a woman cleaning vomit off a baby’s pram. I went to take a photo and he goes ‘Oi! No photos!’ Then I recognised him and asked him for a portrait. He was pumped that I recognised him and told his wife (the woman cleaning up the munt) that I knew him from his Jisoe days, even though I’d never met him before. He then told me he split with his last wife and barely sees the child he had with her in the Jisoe doco. He has a two-year-old kid with his new wife (the one I met) and three days after I met them she was going to court for something I can’t remember. Then he asked me for my number and said if she doesn’t go to prison, if I could take some model shots for her and build a portfolio. Oh and he told me doesn’t paint anymore either.

It was an exciting story, but I still didn’t seem to be any closer to Jisoe. Especially when the number provided by Thomas turned out to be disconnected.

After that I reached out to friends who knew him and are now serving time in Port Phillip Prison and Fulham Correctional—old school Richmond hip-hop heads and graffers from Jisoe’s golden-era—but they had no ideas. I even managed to get hold of three different mobile numbers from a guy who used to babysit Jisoe’s children, but all three numbers were disconnected.

Finally I reached out to my friend Hugh, who was a graffer I’d met at the Victorian College of the Arts, and Hugh explained that Jisoe wasn’t just hard to find, but deliberately hard to find. “Jisoe got pretty angry at the filmmakers,” explained Hugh. “I don’t think he liked having the stuff about his kid make it into the doco. I don’t know if he tried to sue them or anything but it might be hard to get him to trust the media again.”

I’m taking us to a memory now. Back in 2008 I met Jisoe at Flagstaff station in Melbourne. I used to hang around train stations on the Pakenham line and wasted a lot of weekends running with lads from different postcodes who left their kaleidoscopic marks across the city. I never did much painting myself, but it wasn’t about that. It was about being a battler, and Jisoe was the king. So maybe he hates us and wants to be left alone but I’d still prefer to hear it from the enigma himself.

So look, if anyone has any idea where he is email me immediately or hit me up on Instagram. I’ve been losing my marbles trying to find this guy.

mahmood.fazal@vice.com

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