During winter break, Syracuse University seniors Cynthia Wang and Gabrielle Marzolf found themselves rushing to transfer trains in Shanghai, laden down with two cameras, four extra batteries, portable battery-powered lights, boom and lav microphones, a tripod and additional camera lenses.

The task, Wang said, was physically daunting and mentally draining, but its drive was simple: Finding China and Japan’s remote tattoo parlors and getting a glimpse into the counterculture world they represented, one needle stroke at a time.

Wang and Marzolf will present Wang’s honors capstone documentary “Brush and Needle: Tattoo Culture in East Asia” at the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium on April 18 at 5:30 p.m. The screening marks the culmination of months’ worth of research, travel and exploration of the distinct practices of both Japanese and Chinese tattoo artistry, as well as how its stigmatization has helped to cultivate its identity.

Wang and Marzolf studied together in SU’s Central Europe program in fall 2017, where Wang got her first tattoo of Picasso’s “Dove of Peace” done in Poland.

“It looks good, but anyone could have done it,” Wang said. “It’s just something that anyone could have printed off the internet that it doesn’t matter who did it.”

This past October, Marzolf said the two began discussing Wang’s tattoo experience in Poland, along with each of their Asian heritages. During this conversation, Marzolf said, they addressed the “tug of war” between their Asian ancestry and American nationality and began conceptualizing the documentary.

Sheng, a tattoo artist from Mummy Studio in Beijing, sketches upcoming designs. Beijing tattoo culture has a more traditional style, utilizing Chinese calligraphy and watercolors. Courtesy of Gabrielle Marzolf

Marzolf — a television, radio and film and political science dual major — said she was intrigued by the possibility of doing ethnographic research overseas and documenting their findings on film. Paired with Wang’s upcoming honors thesis project, the two collaborated to take their concept to the next level.

“I’ve always been very interested in tattoos, in body modifications,” Wang said. “We came up with this idea — what if we looked at the culture of something that’s stigmatized? Something that contributes to the mainstream culture, but the mainstream society doesn’t claim it?”

Unlike in the United States, tattoos in some East Asian countries are considered tabooed forms of artistic expressions that can cost people their jobs and ability to shop or dine in public stores and restaurants. One of the artists they spent time interviewing, Takashi Yamamoto of Fukui, Japan, was once kicked out of a cafe simply for having tattoos.

Because of the different cultural values related to bodily preservation and censorship, along with connotations of tattoos being synonymous with gang activity, Wang said tattoo culture is more of an underground industry. While selecting tattoo parlors to profile, several of the shops she and Marzolf reached out to for interviews declined and said they wanted to keep practicing,  fearing the documentary would jeopardize their artistic chances.

“It was kind of whoever would take us,” Wang said. “We knew we wanted to look at China — we wanted to look at Shanghai and Beijing, because Beijing is like the old capital heartland, and then Shanghai is very much the cosmopolitan, very open and modern city.”

Another post about the brushes and workspace at Mummy Tattoo because the pictures came out too pretty! Photos by Gabrielle and edits by Dan @shunfad0g
#Beijingtattoo #ChineseTattoo #Beijing #SyracuseUniversity #tattoo #documentary #undergraduateresearch #TattooCultureEast

A photo posted by tattoocultureeast

One of the common misconceptions that some people have of East Asian countries, Wang said, is that they all are culturally synonymous. For Japanese tattooing, Wang said one of the more prominent artistic styles is tebori, something she said is similar to what many Western people think of as stick-and-poke.

With regard to Chinese tattoo practices, she added that different cities reflect divergences between traditional influences and more modern adaptations.

“Beijing has a lot of traditional painters whose technique is really grounded in Chinese calligraphy, in Chinese traditional painting with watercolors,” she said. “In Shanghai, they’re really punk rock.”

For Marzolf, this difference in stylistic practices was reflected in the tattoo artists, as well. In Shanghai, many of the artists profiled maintained a punk aesthetic and were much more extroverted. She added that for many of their Beijing subjects, they were a lot more private about their artistic backgrounds, instead letting the works speak for themselves.

“They’re someone who’s going to go against the grain and they’re someone who doesn’t really care what people’s opinions are of them,” Marzolf said, “and you’re going to guess that they’ve had some history of being ostracized or feeling like an outsider.”

As the two prepare for the screening of their documentary in the next few weeks, there’s both a sense of relief at finalizing the project along with the anxieties that come with sharing your work with a wider audience. This documentary — “my baby,” as Marzolf referred to it — is about so much more than the inks adorning someone’s skin.

For Asian Americans, Wang said there can often be manifestations of internalized racism that extend from having a dual identity.

“It was something that I spent all of my childhood struggling with and now I’m reclaiming it, like ‘Oh, I’m Chinese.’ But I’m not,” Wang said. “It’s an important part of my perspective, but the way I see the world and the way I frame things are still shaped by my experiences growing up in the west.”

Gabrielle Marzolf adjusts her camera and microphone before filming with Mummy Studio artists in Beijing. Courtesy of Cynthia Wang

A hard pill she had to swallow during their process making this documentary, Wang said, was the realization that she is just as American as she is Chinese. While it was difficult to acknowledge, she said it has been fundamental in opening the door to greater conversations  regarding her heritage, perspectives and identity.

Beyond the moments recorded on tape, Wang’s experiences in East Asia have also been permanently documented in other ways: a side tattoo she received while overseas, featuring watercolor flowers and the Chinese characters for ‘chun yu xiao xiao.’

Yu Xiao is her Chinese name.

“It made me realize there’s a whole gap in experience you can’t really bridge,” she said. “But it’s really important to acknowledge it, because then we can talk about it.”

Published on April 3, 2019 at 10:15 pm

Contact Kelsey: katho101@syr.edu | @writtenbykelsey