Art and tattoos – even though there are many points of contact, fine art and tattooing still belong to different worlds. Over the course of time, tattoos have increasingly emerged from the role of a stigma and turned into a mass phenomenon. Since the 1970s and 1980s, tattoos have also become the subject of art, for example in performances with Valie Export or Timm Ulrichs, but there is still a great discrepancy in the evaluation of the classical arts and the craft of tattooing. Pham Thai Ho dares to build bridges in his work. The Vietnamese-born Berlin artist Pham Thai Ho started tattooing while still studying at the Academy of Arts in Munich. As an academy graduate and established tattoo artist, he is part of both art worlds. As a tattoo artist, he is always looking for new ways of artistic expression and thus elevates tattooing from its tradition as a craft activity. At the same time, the artist is breaking new ground in art by placing tattoos and the accompanying social prejudices in the artistic discourse.
In four groups of works, Pham Thai Ho explores the tension between tattoos, art and society. For the “Power Violence” group of works, the artist covers eight baseball bats with “dickpicks” from the Internet. With the sculptures, Pham Thai Ho makes reference to his last series of paintings “Selfish Cocks”. Both series criticize male dominance over women and physically weaker people in general. The male member is presented as a cudgel used to humiliate others.
In his paintings, the artist draws on works by well-known artists such as Egon Schiele and Rubens. He selects the areas with body parts from the paintings, prints them out and “tattoos” them with typical tattoo motifs. He then puts the finishing touches to the works using an oil mixing technique in the tradition of the master stroke. In this composition of classical masterpieces and typical motifs from the tattoo scene, Pham Thai Ho combines two contrasting areas, lifts them out of their context and presents them as a new unit.
The installation “Only god can judge me” consists of a male and female rubber doll and an illuminated sign with the inscription “only god can judge me”. Both dolls are covered with images of Adam and Eve from the visual arts using the adhesive tattoo process. Sex, masturbation and tattoos – still taboos in our society – are linked here with the fall of man.
In “The Eternal Chinese”, Pham Thai Ho addresses racist experiences. The selfie printed on a beer mat, in clichéd form with eyes shaped into slits and smiling nicely, refers to the artist’s training as a brewer in a traditional Bavarian brewery. In this traditional apprenticeship, the artist was repeatedly confronted with the themes of tradition and racism. The beer mats with self-portrait are offered for sale in a vendor’s tray.