News:
  • A History of Asian Americans
  • I Am Not A Virus
  • The Third Line
  • LIFE AFTER MILKBONE
  • eating the gods
  • Kaduna
  • Contact us
  • About
    • What is Cultural Weekly?
    • Advertise
    • Contributors
    • Masthead
    • Subscribe
    • Submissions: Write for us
    • Cultural Weekly Style & Formatting Guide
  • Contact us
  • About
    • What is Cultural Weekly?
    • Advertise
    • Contributors
    • Masthead
    • Subscribe
    • Submissions: Write for us
    • Cultural Weekly Style & Formatting Guide
Cultural Weekly logo
  • Film
  • TV + Web
  • Poetry
  • Art
  • Architecture
  • Literature
  • Theatre
  • Music
  • Dance
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
  • Food
  • Film
  • TV + Web
  • Poetry
  • Art
  • Architecture
  • Literature
  • Theatre
  • Music
  • Dance
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
  • Food

Tattoos Get Respect in San Francisco Shows

By Stephen West on July 17, 2019 in Art

Click Here To View Comments

It’s summer in San Francisco, time to head to the park, demonstrate your hipness, and show off your tattoos. The de Young Museum’s big new exhibition for the season, “Ed Hardy: Deeper Than Skin,” does just that.

Don Ed Hardy, Colors That Never Run, undated, black ink and watercolor on illustration board, collection of the artist, (c) Don Ed Hardy.

Don Ed Hardy, Colors That Never Run, undated, black ink and watercolor on illustration board, collection of the artist, (c) Don Ed Hardy.

The sprawling show features more than 300 works, including early drawings from Hardy’s student days, cartoonish designs for tattoos, fine-art prints, paintings, decorated ceramics, and a 500-foot-long mural-like scroll,  2000 Dragons (top image), that displays several of his recurring visual themes. Some of the works are highly finished, others seem more like sketches or doodles.

The exhibition makes a case that Hardy transformed tattoos from an outsider craft to a mainstream art form, appealing not just to sailors, gangsters, and hippies, but to a broad cross-section of society. (About 30 percent of young Americans now sport a tattoo, according to a wall label.)

Hardy grew up in Southern California, showed a talent for drawing as a 10-year-old, studied printmaking at San Francisco Art Institute, and turned down a graduate fellowship at the Yale School of Art to became a professional tattoo artist in 1968. In 1973, he spent five months in Japan studying tattooing under the master Horihide.

Don Ed Hardy, Colors That Never Run, undated, black ink and watercolor on illustration board, collection of the artist, (c) Don Ed Hardy.

Don Ed Hardy, Climber, 2011, color lithograph, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of the artist, (c) Don Ed Hardy.

An undated illustration or poster, Colors That Never Run, advertises Hardy’s tattoo services with a fierce-looking flying dragon as its centerpiece. The creature sports a flame-like tongue, gorgeously extended wings, sharp claws, and a pointed red tail suitable for a devil.

While much of Hardy’s early commercial tattoo work relied on traditional themes—skulls, flags, hearts, comic-book characters, voluptuous babes—the Asian influence is probably the most important. A lithograph like Climber of 2011 uses an odd overhead angle to depict a bright orange-and-black tiger climbing a monochromatic tree trunk. It seems essentially Japanese. It’s also a polished, mature work of art.

The creatures in 2000 Dragons are inspired by a 13th-century Chinese scroll. Yet the overall work, completed in roughly five-foot sections per day over more than 50 days in 2000, is maddeningly uneven. Some of the dragons are wonderfully rendered, both elegant and a bit scary, while others seem like rough drafts that didn’t really get Hardy’s full attention.

“Ed Hardy: Deeper Than Skin” runs through October 6 at the de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. An extensive catalog is published by the museum.

(Top image: Don Ed Hardy, Detail from 2000 Dragons, 2000, acrylic on Tyvek, collection of the artist, (c) Don Ed Hardy.)

Kabuki Bandits Show Off Their Tattoos

Sumo fight compressed

Toyohara Kunichika, Actors Ichimura Kakitsu IV as Asahina Tobei (right), Nakamura Shikan IV as Washi no Chokichi (center), and Sawamura Tossho II as Yume no Ichibei (left), 1868, woodblock print, ink and colors on paper, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, William Sturgis Bigelow Collection, photograph (c) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

To explore the source of much tattoo art, head across town to the Asian Art Museum, where “Tattoos in Japanese Prints” is on view. It’s a handsome display of more than 60 prints on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, almost all from the 19th century, when tattoos became popular in Japanese art and culture.

The tattoo craze was fueled by the publication of a hugely successful set of prints in the late 1820s by Utagawa Kuniyoshi depicting the bandit-heroes of a folk tale known as the Water Margin. (The ancient tale, originally Chinese, was translated into Japanese in the 18th century.)

Kuniyoshi’s Du Xing, the Devil Faced, shows one of the bandits holding a gigantic bronze bell over his head as he crushes his enemy under a post. His back and upper arms are completely tattooed with a flamboyant blue design.

Many of the works in the exhibition depict kabuki actors playing various famous characters, as in an 1868 print by Toyohara Kunichika (above) that captures a moment of high drama among three tattoo-wearing sumo wrestlers. When a fight breaks out following a controversial match, the most powerful man—Washi no Chokichi, in the center of the three-panel print—steps in to separate the other two.

All three wrestlers sport elaborate tattoos featuring peonies, an eagle on a shoulder, and, on the left figure, a dragon and tiger that would look perfectly at home in an Ed Hardy print.

Beautiful Scrolls

Au Ho-nien and Chao Shao-an, (ITAL) "Lion Companionship," 1963, ink and colors on paper, collection of Yicui Shantang, (c) Au Ho-nien.

Au Ho-nien and Chao Shao-an, Lion Companionship, 1963, ink and colors on paper, collection of Yicui Shantang, (c) Au Ho-nien.

Au Ho-nien and Chao Shao-an, (ITAL) "Lion Companionship," 1963, ink and colors on paper, collection of Yicui Shantang, (c) Au Ho-nien.

Au Ho-nien and Chao Shao-an, Lion Companionship, 1963, ink and colors on paper, collection of Yicui Shantang, (c) Au Ho-nien.

Another show at the Asian Art Museum is not to be missed: “The Bold Brush of Au Ho-nien” presents 22 scroll paintings by a contemporary Chinese artist whose work is part of a traditional style from southern China known as the Lingnan School.

Now based in Taiwan, Au paints traditional subjects such as portraits, landscapes, and wildlife, complete with calligraphy, and occasionally updates the images with modern touches. One landscape, Scenery Around Taroko Gorge, shows a steep, mist-enshrouded, mountain that tumbles down to a road where tiny figures are walking. It looks like a timeless painting, though next to the two hikers is a small, bright-red automobile.

Some of Au’s most spectacular works in the show are the scenes of wildlife, including eagles, a prancing horse, a flutist riding a water buffalo, and—yes!—painted dragons coming to life before two artists.

Lion Companionship of 1963, in two scrolls, depicts a pair of truly regal lions perched on a high ledge. The male on the right surveys the landscape below; the female on the left appears to be sleeping. A close look at their paws shows how deftly Au captures the furry texture of their coats. It’s a spectacular painting.

“Tattoos in Japanese Prints” runs through August 18 at the Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin Street, San Francisco. A catalog is published by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “The Bold Brush of Au Ho-nien” runs through August 25, with a catalog published by the Asian Art Museum.

Click Here To View Comments

Tagsasian art museumau ho-niende young museumed hardyKuniyoshiprintsSan Franciscotattoo

Previous Story

Dare Williams: Four Poems

Next Story

Serpentine L.A. and Beyond

About the author

Stephen West

Stephen West

Stephen West writes about arts and culture in California. Previously he was media business editor at the Los Angeles Times, executive editor of Daily Variety and, until he retired in 2017, an editor and arts writer for Bloomberg News in San Francisco.

Related Posts

  • Customize your home with CanvasChamp

    By Our Friends
    CanvasChamp is a leading state-of-the-art...
  • Frida Kahlo: Portrait of the Artist as a Fashionista

    By Stephen West
    San Francisco museums are starting to reopen...
  • Angst Among the Worker Bees in Gloria

    By Stephen West
    Meet Ani, Dean, and Kendra, editorial...
  • Seeking Nirvana in Tibetan Buddhist Art

    By Stephen West
    Visiting an art exhibition can be an...

Support Our Friends

Follow Us

Join Our Mailing List

Latest Tweets

Tweets by @CulturalWeekly

Comments

  • Lisa Segal Lisa Segal
    Valentine’s Day Redux: a Second Chance at True Love
    Marvelous!!!!!!!
    2/14/2021
  • maurice amiel maurice amiel
    Shakespeare on Despots, Power, and Finally… Transition
    Timely and educational this post Your scholarship...
    1/31/2021
  • maurice amiel maurice amiel
    Abigail Wee: “Growing Home”
    A first place well deserved While the particular...
    1/24/2021

New

  • How to Add Texture to the Wall and the Wall Hangings for Decoration
  • A History of Asian Americans
  • I Am Not A Virus
  • The Third Line
  • LIFE AFTER MILKBONE

Tags

art dance film Los Angeles music photography poem poems poetry tomorrow's voices today

Like us

Please Help

Donate

Who are we?

Cultural Weekly is a place to talk about our creative culture with passion, perspective and analysis – and more words than “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Our mission is to draw attention to our cultural environment, illuminate it, and make it ... read more

Site map

  • About
  • Advertise
  • Contact us
  • Contributors
  • Cultural Weekly Style & Formatting Guide
  • Food
  • Home
  • Masthead
  • Privacy Policy/Do Not Sell My Personal Information
  • Submission Form
  • Submissions: Write for us
  • Subscribe
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Thank You

Links

Adam Leipzig
Entertainment Media Partners
This Is Crowd
CreativeFuture
Plastic Oceans Foundation
Arts & Letters Daily
Alltop
Alexis Rhone Fancher
Jack Grapes
Ethan Bearman
Writ Large Press

Mailing List

* indicates required


  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy/Do Not Sell My Personal Information
  • Contact us
Cultural Weekly is the digital magazine and public platform of Next Echo Foundation. DONATE HERE.
Copyright © 2010-2020 by Adam Leipzig. All Rights Reserved.