Inside the public art that added colour to Surrey’s streets

Jessie Sohpaul memorized his mother’s bus schedule, looking to pinpoint when she would walk through the door of his childhood home after work. 

Sohpaul and his family, who grew up in the Joyce-Collingwood neighbourhood of east Vancouver, relied heavily on public transit as a kid. His parents immigrated to Canada in the early 1980s, and perhaps like many other newcomers, public transit was their connection to work, errands and friends or family.

“It’s something that’s close to my heart,” Sohpaul said. “I know so many people who depend on it.” 

The community sits at a major transit juncture: the SkyTrain’s Expo line, a RapidBus to UBC and 27 bus that runs north-south between Hastings Park and Joyce Station. 

On her way home from work, his mother, who frequently rode the 27 bus to her job in the cafeteria of an RCMP building, visited many businesses around the busy transit hub to get her son a post-school snack. 

“She would always get pizza from Joyce,” Sohpaul said. “So I was always waiting for her bus, I knew the time when the bus would come.” 

Although Sohpaul and his mother frequently relied (and enjoyed) using transit, the story is not similar for many other communities in the Lower Mainland. In Surrey, more than 84 per cent of people used their own vehicle to get to work last year, according to a survey of more than 900 businesses. 

The figure, which was announced a few weeks after TransLink unveiled a new R6 RapidBus line along the Scott Road corridor, was an increase of five per cent from 2023. 

A little over one per cent of respondents said they used public transit. 

“I feel like Surrey is really car heavy and dependent on [vehicles],” said Sohpaul, who is of Punjabi descent and was one of three artists commissioned by TransLink last year to create artwork along the new R6 bus line. 

The initiative, which included two other South Asian artists, Angela Aujila and Keerat Kaur, was the first time TransLink commissioned art for a RapidBus route. 

Sohpaul’s design, a Jaali-patterned glaze on two bus shelters at 72 Avenue and Scott Road, is something that is typically displayed on palaces and forts in north India. With the design, his goal was to flip the stereotypical perception of transit — a form of ridership that is still highly stigmatized — and associate it with royalty. 

“Having it on public transit flips [that perception] because you wouldn’t normally see anything that’s made for royalty in something that’s so accessible,” Sohpaul said. 

Following the recent one year anniversary of the R6 RapidBus announcement — TransLink’s largest service expansion since 2020 — Sohpaul sat down with the Citizen to talk more about his career, the Jaali pattern and the potential of art on public transit. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Surrey Citizen: I’m curious, what inspired you to get into this line of work? 

Sohpaul: As a kid, comic books were a main source of inspiration. I never really read comic books, I was just flipping through the images, and because of that, I picked up a sketchbook and started copying drawings out of the comic books. Slowly, I started to get better at doing my own drawings. 

I was always curious too. So I was trying different things. In high school, I did a lot of visual art and graphic design classes. After I graduated I decided to go into a design program [at SFU], where I learned everything about design and media. But I was still drawing and painting on the side. 

What kind of comic books were you designing or sketching growing up? 

The original ones were just Batman. The point where I was like, ‘oh, I could be really good at this,’ is when I drew the Incredible Hulk. Looking back, it was really bad. But at the time, I was maybe 12, and I was like ‘this is amazing.’ After that, the sketchbook was full of really good drawings, and I never stopped.

What do you remember about that day when you were sketching the Hulk? 

I don’t know where I was or what I was doing, I just remember the feeling. I think a lot of artists can speak on that feeling of getting their idea come to life and seeing this thing you created. Anyone can create, but creating something well creates this feeling within artists … and you’re always trying to chase that feeling. 

It’s a hard feeling to describe. It’s exciting. It’s a fulfilling feeling, it’s really warm and a bit of a buzz too. You’re like, ‘this is really exciting, I wonder what I can do next after this,’ and you’re excited to show people. It’s easier to get that feeling than before, now I feel it’s harder because I’m more particular about what I create. 

On that note, how did the TransLink project come to be? And did you get that feeling when you made your design?

Yeah, definitely. For me, if I don’t get that feeling, I don’t submit the project. Some artists will not do that, they’ll get it to a point where they’re somewhat happy with it, but I have to have that sort of satisfaction. 

[Translink] reached out to 10 artists to write a statement of interest and why they should be selected. In the application, I wrote my family was dependent on transit. When they first came to Canada, my mom and grandparents were going to work through transit. So for me, I described transit as being this lifeline for a lot of newcomers. 

It’s a foundation of your career, in a way that gets overlooked many times — where we talk about starting your first job, but how do you get there? That makes a huge impact. If your commute is horrible, that will transition into your work. But if it’s enjoyable, you’re reading a book getting to where you’re going, that’s gonna make a huge impact on how you’re gonna feel throughout the day. 

Why did you narrow down to the Jaali pattern specifically? 

A lot of the work I do is context-driven. So I think about where this is going to be. What’s the demographic? My background is in user experience, so I’m always thinking about the viewer. I knew the demographics were really heavy on South Asians, but I didn’t want it to only communicate to South Asians. 

I looked at the patterns you typically see in forts or palaces, and wanted to have that on the bus stop, mostly because those patterns are really simple but they’re familiar to South Asians. Even some non-South Asians could resonate with it because they’re so intricate and inviting… 

Where did you learn about the Jaali pattern?

The Jaali are window lattices. In houses in India, they serve a functional purpose as well. I don’t know how they’re constructed but they’d cool the air that was entering, creating this system where air pressure was changing. So there’s almost an air system going in and out because of those patterns. I always thought those were cool because of the shadow they’d cast. 

I experimented with a lot of different patterns. But I landed on one, and that pattern is almost universal — you’re going to see it in mosques in Spain, the Middle East, India. It’s not particular to one place. 

How does the pattern overcome the stigma of riding public transit? 

It invites you to play with the design because you can’t see through it completely. When I visited the bus stop, you can see through the yellow more easily versus the red and blue. So it’s almost like a game if you stand on the other side. That playfulness is interesting on a sunny day…

There’s many ways to take these designs or ideas and encourage public transit. It’s about doing interesting projects that tell a story. Creating things where it invokes a person to explore within the SkyTrain and buses. 

Surrey is developing, so this is the perfect opportunity to have more artwork. Since it’s such a diverse area, it also makes it more inviting, where a bus stop may have this art piece that is apart of my culture — now I feel somewhat more connected to this community. 

I think we never had that in the past. When I was taking buses in the past, you wouldn’t see any South Asian representation. Now the lines have blurred, I’ll leave my house and see aspects of my culture and identity in public transit, which makes the experience more welcoming. 

You can check out Sohpaul’s artwork along the Scott Road R6 bus line or his personal website, where he recently unveiled his latest project, two installations located in the Vancouver International Airport, ‘Passage’ and ‘From here to where,’ aimed at addressing the nerves and excitement newcomers to Canada may have when they enter the country.