Should Street Art Be Restored or Allowed to Fade?

A real bicycle, two local children, and a George Town wall became one of Penang’s most loved public artworks.

Little Children on a Bicycle is the widely used title for one of Ernest Zacharevic’s best-known works in George Town, Penang. During the 2024 restoration, Buletin Mutiara noted that Zacharevic’s George Town murals do not have official titles and that this mural is commonly referred to as Children on a Bicycle. The original Street Art Utopia post from 2012 credits the artwork to Zacharevic, the location to Penang, Malaysia, and the photo to Simstravel.

💡 Nerd Fact: This mural sits inside a UNESCO-listed cityscape. UNESCO describes Melaka and George Town as historic Straits of Malacca trading cities shaped by more than 500 years of exchange between East and West. That means the wall is not just a backdrop. It belongs to a living heritage zone where architecture, trade, religions, languages, festivals, food, and daily life are all part of the story.

🚲 “Little Children on a Bicycle” / “Children on a Bicycle” — By Ernest Zacharevic in George Town, Penang, Malaysia 🇲🇾

On Zacharevic’s own George Town Festival 2012 page, he describes the Penang public pieces as a collaboration with George Town Festival and as his first constructive public art project.

In a Malay Mail interview, Zacharevic said the 2012 series grew out of observing everyday life in George Town: its people, gestures, humor, and contradictions. He also said he chose subjects and locations that already carried social or architectural meaning.

Former George Town Festival director Joe Sidek said in the same interview that Zacharevic’s idea appealed to him because it was about storytelling, people, place, and community, not just murals on walls.

💡 Nerd Fact: Joe Sidek’s reason for supporting the project was also about access. In the same Malay Mail interview, he said he wanted art to move into free public space for people who might never enter a gallery. So the project was not only about beautifying walls. It was also about changing who gets to meet art.

The children behind the mural

The Star reported in 2013 that the children portrayed in the mural are siblings Tan Yi and Tan Kern. Penang Travel Tips gives the same identification and says the original photographs were taken near the Goddess of Mercy Temple around April 2012.

The same local guide places the mural on Armenian Street in George Town and notes that it was painted in conjunction with the 2012 George Town Festival. It also describes the work as combining mural painting with a real prop: an old bicycle.

💡 Nerd Fact: The children were not cast in a studio. Penang Travel Tips records that their parents were on an Urban Sketchers Penang field outing when Zacharevic photographed them near the Goddess of Mercy Temple. In other words, one of Penang’s most photographed murals began as a chance encounter during a sketching walk.

In 2024, The Straits Times reported that Tan Yi and Tan Kern reunited with Zacharevic on Oct. 19, 2024, after the mural’s restoration. Tan Kern described the source image as a candid shot, while Tan Yi remembered playing and laughing on the oversized bicycle.

From festival work to public landmark

Penang Travel Tips recorded the public response early: visitors stopped to photograph the mural, creative poses followed, and by August 2013 long queues had formed for photos.

💡 Nerd Fact: The photo queue became interesting enough to study. A 2017 tourism-impact paper used Children on a Bicycle on Armenian Street as part of a street survey and discussed how visitors posed, photographed, and shared George Town’s murals. The paper also noted that scenes such as children on a bicycle, stray cats, and a sleepy trishaw man felt like local culture to visitors — showing how the artwork had become a social ritual, not just an image on a wall.

In 2024, Cultprint by ZACH Studio’s exhibition text for Zacharevic’s Mural Mural on the Wall described Kids on Bicycle as one of his most beloved and most overexposed works, now at the center of a busy tourist hotspot where questions of living heritage, gentrification, displacement, and public-art ownership come with the fame.

The mural also had to be protected and repaired. Penang Travel Tips records defacement incidents in 2012 and 2013. In a later Malay Mail article about public art in Malaysia, Zacharevic said there is beauty in ephemerality, while also noting that some works become so embedded in a city’s identity that it is hard to imagine the place without them.

💡 Nerd Fact: In George Town’s World Heritage Site, public art is also a heritage-management issue. George Town World Heritage Incorporated says mural-related artworks are evaluated by a Public Arts Review Panel, and proposals can be rejected if they detract from the Outstanding Universal Value of the site’s tangible and intangible heritage.

Restored for the city

In 2024, Bernama reported that Zacharevic agreed to help restore three of his most iconic George Town murals, including Children on a Bicycle on Lebuh Armenian. Penang official Wong Hon Wai said the murals had attracted global attention and helped place Penang on the world stage for heritage and contemporary street art.

A later Straits Times report said the completed restoration covered four murals, including Children On A Bicycle, and involved cleaning the walls, restoring the attached props, and touching up the colors. Zacharevic said his aim was to bring the murals back to the way they looked in 2012.

💡 Nerd Fact: The restoration had to work around the city itself. The Straits Times reported that Zacharevic worked early in the morning or late at night because of Penang’s heat, humidity, vehicle traffic, and crowds. A studio canvas can wait; a street wall has rush hour.

For more George Town works, explore our George Town street art collection. You can also visit Ernest Zacharevic’s website or follow him on Instagram.

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When should a street artwork be allowed to fade, and when has it become part of a city’s memory?