Undisciplined Festival: Feminine Ink and Cultural Tapestries in 'Mark of a Woman'
- Elspeth Chan
- Mar 18
- 3 min read
The Mark of a Woman is a compelling performance created by artist Chisato Minamimura, offering a unique deaf perspective on the intersection of women and tattooing cultures across centuries. The show ingeniously combines Visual Vernacular, digital animation, kinetic and video projection, and Woojer™ technology, a sensory wearable that converts audio into haptic sensations, to narrate untold stories.
Inspired by a tattooed human skin sample from the Wellcome Collection research project, Minamimura's performance begins with a powerful visual and sensory experience. Dressed in all-white, she signs and physically enacts skin piercing - as someone with multiple tattoos, watching her action with the haptic device on my forearm, this belt generates pulses reminiscent of my tattooing process.
The performance excels in presenting a global perspective on tattoos and women. Minamimura skilfully weaves stories about tattoos from Indigenous groups, including the Kayan tribes and the Ryukyuan women's Hajichi tattoos in Okinawa, Japan. Tattoos serve as an entry point that explores spiritual significance and ancestral connection, alongside the role of the tattoo in female empowerment and cultural heritage preservation for the Okinawans.
Through animated sea waves and mountains, Minamimura's circling hand gestures and steps mimic looking through binoculars, exploring new lands and witnessing tidal changes around continents, symbolically linking the birth and death cycle with the imaginary inter-generational threads. The synchronization of these movements with the Woojer™ pulses creates a visceral connection to the survival and celebratory stories behind the de-/colonization of these Indigenous groups.
The performance then sails around the globe to the Western tattooing culture in front of a crowd of silhouettes in Victorian-style costumes on the projection screen, touching upon slavery and social status through Minamimura’s expressive face and body language. The depiction of Churchill's mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, who had a discreet tattoo of a snake around her forearm is a notable addition. Minamimura also humorously portrays Maud Stevens Wagner, the first known female tattoo artist, and her husband Gus Wagner, in Charlie Chaplin-esque style in front of the ‘glitched’ projection, highlighting this American lady’s legacy in a male-dominated profession, even now.
The show concludes with an inspiring story of a breast cancer survivor, Sonia Zambakides, who used tattoos as an artistic tool to ‘replace pain with beauty and artwork’. Minamimura's presence on stage is reduced here, but she appears later on in the frame next to Sonia Zambakides in the video projection. Then she appears on the stage, claiming her desire to leave a lasting impression on the audience through her performance, although tattoo-less herself.
The Mark of a Woman celebrates women who challenge norms and redefine beauty across cultures and centuries. Minamimura's extensive research shines, as much as the resilience of the female figures in history, by using tattoos as a metaphor for permanent ancestral heritage in contrast to changing bodies and cultural identities. This work also prompts contemplation on the notions of permanence and indigeneity, of which existence is often threatened under modernity, echoing the controversially shifting perspectives of tattoo cultures around the turn of modernization.
While Minamimura's Visual Vernacular is highly accessible with rhythmic movements and comprehensible gestures, the performance could benefit from improved cohesion between segments. Additionally, more embodied elements towards the end would enrich the notion of female presence through bodily ownership. The Woojer™ technology, while innovative in bridging perceptual gaps between audiences possessing different sensory experiences, could be better utilized to deliver a more immersive experience.
