21st century Suikoden: Tattoo reinterpretations of the ‘Water Margin’ as racialized resistance in Chicano Los Angeles

Abstract

This article focuses on tattoo artist Chris Brand’s recent project, 108 Heroes of Los Angeles, as a way to understand how experiences of minoritization are narrated through the racialized geographies and historical specificities of global Los Angeles. Basing his work on the woodblock prints of nineteenth century artist Kuniyoshi, Brand reinvents the heroic figures of the fourteenth century Chinese novel ‘Water Margin’, or Suikoden, in Japanese, by inserting in their place Chicano heroes in the context of 1980s Los Angeles. Brand’s personal and professional experiences have enabled him to develop a visual aesthetics that reflects a particular Angeleno perspective. By combining Chicano black and grey tattooing with Japanese tattooing, Brand’s work highlights the ways in which the Suikoden’s transculturation across space and time function to redefine our understanding of urban topographies of race, the narration of marginality, and the circulating aesthetics of resistance that converge at the intimate scale of the body.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the following individuals who helped make this article possible: Chris Brand for allowing us to interview him and for sharing his work and insights; Jack Rudy, Chris Brand, and Kip Fulbeck for permission to use images; Timothy Laurie, Rimi Khan, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments to earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. One theory of how the Japanese body suit developed was that the large pictorial pieces were an elaborate way of covering up criminal tattooing, which were often individual marks on the skin.

2. The term ‘positionality’ emerges from feminist theories that explore the situated nature of knowledge production. To quote Maher and Tetreault (1993), ‘By positionality we mean … that gender, race, class and other aspects of our identities are markers of relational positions rather than essential qualities. Knowledge is valid when it includes an acknowledgment of the knower’s specific position in any context, because changing contextual and relational factors are crucial for defining identities and our knowledge in any given situation’ (118). We use the term ‘positionality’ to indicate the ways in which Brand’s life experiences are situated within particular social and political contexts that, in turn, have contributed to his knowledge and practice of different cultural aesthetics.

3. Our usage of the term ‘people of colour’ is framed within a U.S.-based racial discourse to describe non-white groups and their shared experiences of systemic racism. Robin D.G. Kelley defines ‘people of colour’ as a ‘relationship defined by racism, dispossession and imperialism’ and which enables the creation of new identities, new relationships and new ways of learning from each other for the purposes of revolutionary struggle (Imarisha, Kelley, and Horstmann 2016). For the purposes of our analysis, invoking ‘people of colour’ as a particular form of positionality allows us to draw linkages between how different aesthetic traditions emerge from histories of oppression and struggle. These commonalities open up creative ways that they can be brought together through the process of transculturation.

4. According to Brand (2015), for the 108 Heroes project, half of the bodies are Chicano; all of them have some relationship to Los Angeles. More specifically, when conceptualizing how the tattoo narrative will take shape, the process is intimately collaborative. Brand states, ‘The tattoo is not just about me saying my thing. It’s a team effort. So if they [clients] have preferences, I want to know what those preferences are. I want to be able to figure that out with them. I show them the books, they see something visually that impacts them, I then ask whether the character has anything in relation to their personal history’. To date, the bodies who represent Brand’s renarration of the Suikoden have numerous similarities to the characters portrayed on their body ‘The whole line up of people you see [with the 108 Heroes tattoos], they’re absolute reflections of them [the characters] in an almost eerie way’.

5. Our approach to analysing embodied forms of visual culture is informed by recent theories of new materialism and its relationship to artistic transformations of the body. New materialism can help explain the process of artistic creation that empowers multiple racialized subjective realities. In this way, new materialism allows for the embodiment of humanity through the consumption of our material world. More specifically, artists can consume, shape, alter, and expand our notions of reality and agency through the process of creation, or the materialization of objects and bodies (Dolphijn and Der Tuin 2012).

6. After many years of tattooing, Brand was given the title Horishiki by his mentor, Horitomo (Kazuaki Kitamura). Normally, within the traditional practice of Japanese tattooing, when tattoo artists are given titles, it is assumed they have become a part of a hierarchical family structure, and the tattoo artist must remain loyal and work under their new ‘masters’. But nowadays, certain segments of Japanese tattoo culture have become increasingly influenced by Western practices, in which it is not uncommon to follow different sets of protocols for naming and its associated obligations. For Brand, his title did not come with any specific requirements or loyalties. Instead, his mentor bestowed the title as a way to recognize his work and his contributions to Japanese tattooing.