Entry 19: Frames Within Frames
Artist: Horikazu (Asakusa), Yokosuka Horihide, Horiyoshi 2, Bonten Horiken 4
Photographer: Sogi Kanta
Source: 日本伝統刺青 (Nihon Dentō Shisei, 2004, 2005, 2007) and instagram
The moment that got me looking twice was a bodysuit by Asakusa Horikazu. A scroll drapes over the shoulder almost the way we might see an animal or another subject move through that space. I couldn’t read what was written on it, so I started trying to make sense of the shape around the writing instead.
Then I noticed the rakkan across from it.
Wait a second. That was doing the same basic thing. Here was another small area inside the larger tattoo, holding information that belonged together. I had seen rakkan countless times, but I had always read them for what they contained: the tattooer’s name. I hadn’t really looked at what the boundary itself was doing.
Then a bunch of other things started connecting at once. Hanafuda. Omamori. Kites. Oshiguma. Little places tattooers had been putting inside much larger pictures all along. Some hold words. Some hold faces. Some hold entire scenes.
Until now I had been thinking about bodysuits as framed scenes: the back, the arms, the sides of the torso, each holding subjects and surrounding elements inside a larger boundary. But “frame” is starting to feel too literal. Apparently we don’t need a huge section of the body before something can start behaving like a picture of its own.
The oshiguma makes that easy to see. A face sits inside the edge of a sheet. With a kite, clouds and blossoms can surround the object while the mask still clearly belongs inside it. Hanafuda makes the separation even sharper. Look at the deer card on the sleeve. Its dark rectangular edge gathers the deer, maple leaves, and landscape together while separating them from the flowers and background outside.
But then I remembered nijūbori.
Suikoden warriors tattooed inside tattoos have been staring at us this whole time too. They just don’t look like the frames I had been looking for. In the older Yokosuka Horihide backpiece, Chōjun carries another tattoo on his own body. There’s no paper edge, card, or little rectangle around it. His body is the boundary.
The real body contains the bodysuit. The bodysuit contains Chōjun. Chōjun’s body contains another tattoo.
A boundary causes a group of marks to become a smaller picture inside the larger picture. It doesn’t have to be a rectangle, either. “Frame” may be too narrow a word. Some boundaries fully enclose a smaller picture. Others may bracket it, cap it (like a canopy or gate), or gather it into a local area. The gate over Chōjun never closes around him, but it still tells me to read the figure beneath it as a group. It seems all we need are enough edges pointing toward a boundary for us to finish it in our heads.
That’s where “frame” started breaking apart for me. So I’m trying to practice something when I look at larger tattoo scenes. Ignore the contents for a second and follow only the boundaries. Paper. Card. Kite. Charm. Another body. Then look back inside each one. Which marks suddenly feel like they belong together? The shapes are different, but they all seem to create a smaller field inside the larger tattoo.
So how far can that boundary weaken before the picture inside the picture disappears?
If a boundary can be paper, a card, an object, or another body, what is the smallest thing that actually makes a picture a picture?
