Lübeck 1996

Art and tattoos - even if there are many points of contact, the visual arts and tattooing still belong to different worlds. In the course of time, the tattoo increasingly rose from the role of a stigma and turned into a mass phenomenon. Since the 1970s and 1980s, tattoos have also been an object of art, for example in performances with Valie Export or Timm Ulrichs, but there is still a large discrepancy in the assessment of the classical arts and the craft of tattooing. Pham Thai Ho dares to build bridges in his work. The Vietnamese 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 artistic forms of expression and thus elevates tattooing from his tradition as a craft activity. At the same time, the artist treads new paths in art by placing tattoos and the societal prejudices that resonate with them in the artistic discourse.