Kwinnie Lê, The land of the tattooed: ungodly beasts

During their residency at Hotel Maria Kapel, artist Kwinnie Lê investigates the way tattoo traditions were erased during colonial rule. This continues to be reinforced by the ongoing 'demonisation' of tattooing practices, even in the years well after colonisation. With The land of the tattooed; ungodly beasts, Kwinnie questions the place of these traditions and mythologies in our contemporary world.

An installation of suspended tapestries covered with semi-fictional writings will set the arena for meetings, performances and private tattooing rituals with guest-participants Joe Patty Sabandar (traditional tattoo artist), Fileona Dkhar (visual artist) and Nash Caldera (visual artist), thus investigating their cultural heritage and the way it has been excluded from the modern tattoo industry.

Land of the tattooed
With The land of the tattooed; ungodly beasts, Kwinnie Lê presents an installation in which she exposes the colonial history behind tattoos. The hanging fabrics are covered with patterns and prints of woodcuts Kwinnie made during the residency. Some of these symbols and patterns are based on the Đông Sơn drum and can still be found in Vietnam, on gates, furniture and ornamental objects.

The land of the tattooed is a semi-fictional state that takes its name from the historical state of Vietnam: Văn Lang, which roughly translated means 'the land of the tattooed' and where everyone was covered from head to toe in tattoos. Kwinnie integrates this lore into the installation, where the hanging fabrics are printed with a semi-fictional alphabet that is an mix of the Latin alphabet, the alphabet Kwinnie Le uses daily (English, Vietnamese and Dutch), and ancestral patterns that were tattooed at the time. 

Hanging in a spiral, the fabrics provide a safe place during the exhibition, where people can gather and rituals can take place - in the form of meetings, performances and private tattoo rituals with guest participants such as Joe Patty-Sabandar, a Moluccan traditional tattooist living in Hoorn.

Ungodly beasts
The title Ungodly beasts refers to a specific form of human zoos: the widespread exhibitions of enslaved tattooed people from the colonies until the late 19th century in Europe and North America. Although this particular form became popular from the 18th century after the London exhibition of a Filipino man named Jeoly, the oldest found documentation leads to The Hague (and Antwerp) in the 16th century, in which an Inuit woman was labelled an 'ungodly beast'. As a tribute to this woman, Kwinnie built a small altar in the chapel to commemorate her.

Kwinnie Lê is an artist, researcher, poet and shapeshifter working on the intersection of body and language. By examining their abilities to simultaneously admit and exclude, they hope to amplify counternarratives while still acknowledging these exclusions as inseparable  from violence. Yet, a story of survival can still be told. Lê is currently investigating the revival and (re)inscription of traditional tattooing and engages in semi-fictional narratives as a  mode of critical speculation. By departing from mythology, folklore and oral histories, they  situate ancestral traditions in contemporary urban life. Lê's work desires to question the power of perception and re-suture narratives of classification. 

Made possible with help of: Mondriaan Fonds, Gemeente Hoorn, CBK Rotterdam.

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