Visitors flocked Friday to a Hong Kong tattoo convention, the first to be held in the southern Chinese city where tattoos were once seen as a sign of triad gang membership.
The show features more than 30 artists from countries ranging from South Africa to mainland China.
It aims to challenge “that old-fashioned notion that it’s just gangsters and sailors” who get tattoed, co-organizer Jay Foss Cole told AFP.
Photo: EPA
Hong Kong’s lawyers, doctors and university professors all sport the skin designs, said Foss Cole, also known as Jay FC, and they also appeal to people in creative industries.
Visitors, many of whom wore revealing clothing to display their own prized body sketches, browsed through designs, chose new ones and checked out different marking pens and techniques.
Spectators were awestruck by the sight of four near-nude male models showcasing their colorful full-body tattoos in Japanese style.
Photo: EPA
“I got mine because I love it,” said one of the models.
The work took 12 hours.
Others sprawled on the beds or chairs of tattoo artists and watched intently as intricate designs were inked onto their skin.
Historically tattoos on younger Chinese have largely been the preserve of triad gangsters, but the designs have begun to gain popularity among the mainstream community in recent years.
“Young people are changing their minds, not like before when they thought only mafia members wore them. Now it’s more like art,” Beijing-based tattoo artist Qi Xulong, known as “Little Dragon,” told AFP.
“Long time ago, Chinese people in Beijing and Shanghai, they don’t think that tattoos are good,” Qi said, adding that now people increasingly use tattoos to express their identities.
Foss Cole said Hong Kong’s tattoo culture is improving. “There’s more artists, there’s better artists, there’s more style, and there’s never been anything like this,” he said of the show.
The convention, said Foss Cole, shows that Hong Kong “has arrived as a world-class destination for tattoos and tattoo artists.”
Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
The March/April volume of Foreign Affairs, long a purveyor of pro-China pablum, offered up another irksome Beijing-speak on the issues and solutions for the problems vexing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back From the Brink” rang the provocative title, by David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi (王緝思). If one ever wants to describe what went wrong with US-PRC relations, the career of Wang Jisi is a good place to start. Wang has extensive experience in the US and the West. He was a visiting
The January 2028 presidential election is already stirring to life. In seven or eight months, the primary season will kick into high gear following this November’s local elections. By this point next year, we will likely know the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate and whether the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) will be fielding a candidate. Also around this time, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) will either have already completed their primary, or it will be heading into the final stretch. By next summer, the presidential race will be in high gear. The big question is who will be the KMT’s
RSS