Tattoo, or Inkbody
Yale University
2023
In 2001, Chinese artist Zhang Huan, based in New York City, presented a unique performance by transforming his face into a blank canvas. Three calligraphers, specially invited for the occasion, covered his facial canvas with various Chinese ink-inscribed words. Captured through nine photographs titled Family Tree, Zhang
Historically formulated in China for writing and drawing, China ink is inherently cultural, but I ponder whether Inkbody is also cultural. An ancient Chinese proverb describes a knowledgeable person as having a stomach filled with ink. What constitutes an inkbody? As I gaze into Zhang's pale, vacant, and unemotional eyes in the final photograph of his Family Tree, I realize that race and gender have become irrelevant - the multitudes of bodies are unified through ink.
Tattoo indicates permanence, but inkbody can be simultaneously permanent and temporary.
On Zhang’s face, the three calligraphers wrote a combination of words from Chinese culture - idioms (Chengyu), tales, stories, names nostalgic to Zhang Huan, and ancient Chinese practices of physiognomy. Zhang wanted to accentuate his cultural lineage, his 'Chinese-ness,' by having China ink inscribed on his face. However, upon crossing the threshold, ink consumed all of Zhang’s recognizable features and identities. Zhang’s face, submerged in ink, no longer mirrors the social constructs that shaped him; he is now merely an organism conceived of ink. Taken to the extreme, it appears that cultures have been removed from the cultures in ink.
Inkbody always has a punitive connotation. Inking (墨刑/黥面) is among the five penalties administered by the legal system of ancient dynastic China, the offender would be tattooed on the face or forehead with indelible ink, such as 奴 (Nú / male slave), 婢 (Bì / female slave), 盜 (Dào / thief), 賊 (Zéi / Bandit). During the Wu Zhou and Tang dynasties, Shangguan Wan'er (上官婉儿), a Chinese female politician, poet, and imperial consort, had once been subjected to the Inking penalty, which involved face-tattooing. Nevertheless, she ingeniously utilized ink to mend her "inkbody" and created a distinctive plum-blossom makeup style to gracefully embrace the area where the tattoo had been engraved on her face. This plum-blossom trend gained widespread admiration among the female populations back then.
Inkbody encapsulates a sense of duality, where the body serves as either a canvas, a brush, or sometimes both. Mapped over the terrain of one’s body, ink flows, and no stroke is absolutely horizontal or vertical across the texture of human skin. Body is a canvas, a roll of paper, or a vast landscape where each ink drop travels through.
A temporary inkbody is an ephemeral performance, but a permanent inkbody is a monument.
Ink, on the body, forms a layer of poché between the interiority and external world, and the external world becomes the extension of the human body. Inkbody is always incomplete, cut through the skin. The thickness of the poché becomes an outlet of ink - as inkbody navigates the surrounding sites, it marks a territory of bodily perception and mental map. Our human bodies, engineered with prosthetic ink matter, becomes a drawing practice that measures, documents, and engages with perceptual realities.
Note:
Family Tree (2001), Zhang Huan