I’m excited to share this new springtime flash with you while I ramble away all the recent adventure and thoughts that have accompanied my making process recently.

I have been walking more than usual, feeling the spring in my steps even though I could feel my seasonal allergy catching up with me every time I step outside, (they say that’s the price you pay for living in the U.S. for too long, and it indeed has been 11 years for me). My good friend Jia Sung who’s an excellent artist (you can check out her work here) has recently begun her artist residency at Greenwood Cemetery and we have been walking together on the cemetery ground while she tells me the lores of the place.

One of the lores she told me - Charles Feltman, the hotdog inventor, a German immigrant and a baker, has his grave in greenwood, a classical style temple mausoleum, with occasional hotdog fans leaving actual hotdogs at the foot of the temple. In the good old American immigrant fashion, as Architectural Eclecticism would describe, the ornamentation of his grave is arguably convoluted, Greek columns here, Gothic arches there, Roman domes on top.

A couple days later after my Greenwood walk, my partner and I went to MET Cloister. I had presumed that MET had built their collections in an existing architectural site (maybe an old monastery, or an old fortress). I was however very surprised to find out that the structure that houses the Cloister collection was relatively newly built to complement all the ornamental archways and windows acquired from the old continent, artifacts from 17th and 18th century Western Europe.

I’ve always been fascinated with the American’s need to feel connected to a history that has long ceased to be their own, to feel old and rooted enough and therefore valid enough to be something of its own. There is a word for this too apparently, pastiche — architecture as costume, wearing the clothes of a civilization without necessarily inheriting its logic. This practice can often feel to me amusingly like a double edged sword - some examples are just soulless thievery, but some, it surprises even me to say are these wonderfully Frankensteinian concoctions that have entire lives of their own. Like Hearst Castle’s “ranch door” that looks more like a Gothic church’s grand entrance. Is it blasphemous or is it marvelous. Who am I to say?

It’s through these thought marination, I’ve drawn these new flash - ornaments from my Greenwood and MET Cloister walks in the early springtime, reinvented in my own interpretation, echoing the original ornaments and how they had come about. Of course, I have also woven in my usual rope and fire element into these designs. Maybe after all, I too have inherited America’s anxiety over borrowed identity after 11 years of living in the U.S.. Or maybe, somewhere in me, I have the sympathy for a Frankensteinian creature, an entirely different species we are, straddling two worlds.

In other news, I have recently done a very sweet wrap-around tattoo project for a friend. She had requested a few hummingbird-like creatures, a bit alien and unusual, to be messengers and fly around her shoulders. I thoroughly enjoyed drawing their long drawn out alien feathers and their double eyes. I hope you find them as precious as I do.

Lastly, I had almost forgotten these old spring flash I’ve made last year, so many of them have yet to be claimed and I really want to find them a home.

As usual, if you’d like to book me for a tattoo, flash or custom, the booking form link is below.

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Wishing you all a joyous spring,

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I have been doing some preliminary research into the new year and what I should prepare and bring forward, and this is what I’ve found - 丙午 is the 43rd combination in the traditional Chinese sexagenary cycle, corresponding to the Year of the Fire Horse. The heavenly stem “Bing”(丙) belongs to the element Fire, and the earthly branch “Wu”(午) corresponds to the Horse. In the Five Elements attributes: Bing (丙) represents Yang Fire, and Wu (午) represents Yang Fire (Horse). Therefore, the year of Bingwu (丙午) is often referred to as the “Fire Horse” or “Red Horse” year. Fire can be passionate but also can be catastrophic. For some, the year can bring a certain brightness and dynamism; for others, it can bring trials and tribulations. One thing is for sure though, this is a year of ~CHANGE~

Through the reading of the coming lunar new year, I want to bring the energy of change and movement into my flash and I want to walk you through my process below.

LNY-26-R1 + LNY-26-B1: Based on The horse in motion, a series of cabinet cards by Eadward Muybridge - one of the first attempts at recording time and a version of early cinema. Interesting to note that it was the first time capturing horses in mid motion hence this funny quote from The Sacramento Daily Union, “It was shown that the supposed superior grace of the horse while running is in reality a delusion: that the feet are gotten into all sorts of queer positions.” (Queer positions you say?? So of course I had to make a small stop motion animation of the horse with all its queer positions~) This flash is perfect as an arm band or have the horses galloping down the side of your torso and let the energy of movement and change wash over you.

LNY-26-R2 + LNY-26-B2: Referencing traditional Chinese paper cut horse with Ne Zha’s wind and fire wheels (风火轮), what’s more a call for change than Ne Zha, our mythological trans icon (reborn with lotus stem as bones, lotus flower as flesh) who rebels against a repressive system.

LNY-26-R3 + LNY-26-B3 Using clerical script calligraphy of the Chinese character 马/馬 (horse) arranged in clouds with fire peeking through, I simply was having fun researching how this character evolved through different dynasties.

LNY-26-R4 + LNY-26-B4 Based on the Chinese Bronze sculpture from the 2d century CE, the Flying Horse of Gansu. Fun detail that really drew me to use this sculpture as reference is this particular remark on the detail of this sculpture -“Perfectly balanced, on the one hood which rest without pressure on a flying swallow”.

LNY-26-R5 +LNY-26-B5 Cowboys and lassos! Lasso as talisman!!!

LNY-26-RB6 what’s a LNY celebratory flash without the traditional new year picture (年画). Traditionally done as a pair in multicolor woodblock print to be put on the door panels. I also replaced the realistically depicted horse with a stuffed toy horse to add a bit of whimsy in this flash.

LNY-26-R7+LNY-26-B7 traditional seal capturing the evolution of the character as both the signifier and the signified mirror each other.

If you are interested in getting a lunar new year flash from me, or if you have a custom design idea you’d like to realize, booking link is below<3

I hope you stay safe and the year brings you the change you want to see.

With love,

TATTOO BOOKING FORM

I had started this year with an evolving project that has been very dear to my heart - Building a back piece for my partner (now my wife could you believe it). We had started this project January 2025, one of my first tattoo after a year-long hiatus and now almost exactly one year later, we are extending the piece down her spine in a repeating scaffold knots with braided rope pattern.

This project is a pure labor of love. I meditated on what it means to be entrusted to adorn a body, especially a trans body. While drawing this design, I thought of the laced back of a corset, how a corset - a garment can be so armor-like. I thought of what Donna Haraway had wrote on cyborg and how the exoskeleton quality of this tattoo (and of any tattoo really) is quite fitting for the human/machine chimeric nature. And it is in those rumination I finalized the design and now it is the sweetest wedding gift I could ever think of offering to my partner - a small piece of ornamental, protective armor.

The next project I want to share with you is my part of the trade with Ze (IG: @Silky.rabbit). Ze had expressed to me that she wanted a part of the function of the tattoo design to be diverting attention from the two scars on her back. So in this design, I chose to incorporate two of my favorite motifs - cloud and rope.

Borrowing from the idea of rhizomatic thought (in a literal way), I looked to the pattern and movement of rhizome, limbs for transporting and storing nutrition. I hoped for the tattoo to function in similar ways - ever nurturing the body.

Now on to my booking - I want to continue the same spirit of my tattooing as makings of acupunctural sigils, of protection spells, of cybogian exoskeleton and of rhizomatic mapping. So if you have a custom idea in similar realm you’d like me to realize in tattoo form, please fill out my Booking Form. Alternatively, there are also a few flash designs I’ve made over the past year in a similar thought process that are available to book.

And very lastly, stay tuned for some fire horse flash for the coming Lunar New Year!

Grateful for you all and thanks for reading!

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Some tattoo highlights of first half of this year:

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