This article is part of Mochi Magazine’s summer issue on Art — click here to read the rest of the issue.
Before colonization, the Philippines had a deep history of tattooing called batok, the practice and art of hand poking tattoos with sticks and thorns. Tattoos adorn individuals in many parts of the world as an integral part of their culture — markings for warriors, symbols of strength, social standing, beauty, and even for healing and spiritual purposes. However, the practice of batok began to disappear as Filipino culture shifted to seeing tattoos as archaic and ugly, and molded to what was acceptable to colonizers’ interpretation of beauty.
“In pre-colonial times, somebody would have tattooed all of us,” says Jo Bulaong.
Bulaong, a nonbinary second-generation Pilipinx, practices ceremonial hand-poked tattoos in Sacramento, California, and is finding a way to bridge tradition with the complex diaspora of later generations.
Their work is rooted in ritual and spiritual practices; they describe it as “a decolonized approach to tattoo medicine. Marking our bodies is a radical self-reclamation within oppressive structures that seek to control, contain, and categorize our vessels.” They also avoid claiming they are doing traditional, precolonial Filipino tattoo rituals.
“It isn’t my right to claim that,” Bulaong explains. “Even though my family and my lineage are from the Philippines, there is a difference in the contemporary tattoo rituals I’m doing now while still honoring the authenticity and traditions of the old ways. I’m still trying to find a way to bridge these together, but not necessarily recreate it piece by piece.”
Their beginning of this practice was a deep journey into themselves and their culture.
Family expectations, immigrant experiences of survival, and the cultural emphasis on high-paying careers made Bulaong push any creative self-expression away. Before becoming a tattoo artist, they majored in political science…
Read the full article here
