Los Angeles Artist Jun Cha has quickly made a name for himself in the tattooing scene. For the admittedly serious 22-year-old, it’s an art form that goes beyond skin deep.
by Sung-Min Yi
photographs by Eric Sueyoshi
The battle is over. All that’s left is for the scavengers to pick at the quivering corpses of dead samurai littering the battlefield. A Korean warrior strafes the landscape with his gaze, seeking signs of danger. Seeing none, he gives the signal to raise the Korean flag. The warrior then raises his steed onto its hind legs and rends the air with a triumphant cry.
“I don’t think my Japanese friends are going to like this,” tattoo artist Jun Cha says evenly, assessing his own work on this human canvas. It’s a full back black-and-gray piece depicting the 16th-century Admiral Yi Sun-Shin, a real-life warrior from Korean history.
This is Cha’s fourth session with this client at the tattooist’s art-lined studio in southwestern Los Angeles. At 22—he’d look younger if not for his own skin art—Cha is a rising star in the tattoo world. He’s traveled the globe with Los Angeles’ famed Lowrider Tattoo Studios. He’s also set up his own imprint, Arudima, to house his design work. And he’s tattooed his share of celebrities, including producer Jermaine Dupri (on his ribcage, a portrait of then-girlfriend Janet Jackson, posing as the Virgin Mary); Los Angeles Dodger outfielder Matt Kemp (left sleeve of the archangel Michael); and rapper Freddie Gibbs (full-back piece of Black Panther Huey P. Newton, sitting regally in a wicker chair, shotgun in hand).
This afternoon’s client, a young Korean American man, has already had several other Korea-themed tattoos done, but this would be his largest tribute to the land of his forebears.
“What happened here?” Cha asks the client, whose name is withheld at the request of the tattooist. Admiral Yi seemed to be staring at a nick in the skin near the client’s scapula. “Did you get it checked out?”
“Oh, I just got scratched,” he responds. Cha checks the area with his hands, gloved in black latex and then moves on. He won’t be working on that part of the tattoo that day anyway. The healing on the rest of the skin appears to be satisfactory, so Cha starts to prepare the surface by shaving barely noticeable hairs on the client’s back. Drawing on paper can be hard enough, but skin is wildly unpredictable as a canvas. A confident illustrator could easily be flummoxed by variations in skin thickness, skin firmness and proximity to bone, let alone the body’s immediate immune response to the injection of foreign particles. “The key thing is adaptability,” Cha says. “Being able to be open to the circumstances. Because everyone’s skin is different.”
He turns his attention back to the client. “Did you have anything to eat?” No, the client responds. “I have a sandwich. Do you want to split it?” Cha asks. With five hours of slow bleeding and pain in store, it’s always better to come to a session well-fed. “Back pieces hurt,” Cha says with a smile. “Tattoos hurt.”
The client’s initial idea for the tattoo had been to pay tribute to Korea’s resolve during its centuries-long strife with Japan by showing a medieval Korean warrior on horseback, trampling dead samurai. Cha started researching, as he often does to help develop a tattoo.
“People … are attracted to the imagery, but they’re only getting half of what makes a really good tattoo,” he says. “[The research] provides a more meaningful kind of a piece. And especially with this piece because we both didn’t really know about Korean history.”
Yi is an apt choice to represent the Korean warrior spirit. He is, unquestionably, the most famous military figure in Korean history. “He was kind of our Pancho Villa,” Cha says, referring to the famed Mexican general. Cha and the client start trading trivia about Yi. He went undefeated in his 23 battles against invading Japanese forces. He invented the world’s first ironclad ships, the turtle boats. And his heroic last words: “Don’t let them know I’m dead,” he said, during battle, mortally wounded, as his nephew donned Yi’s armor to rally the troops.
Pictures of Yi’s statues are clipped onto a music stand as references for his face and armor. Cha pulls his chair close to the stand, and the client settles into a rolling chair, his back facing the tattooist.
“What do you want to watch?” Cha asks, pointing to roughly 40 movies in the case below the television. The client chooses Kill Bill,Vol.1. As Cha talks about the historically strained relations between Korea and Japan, he hits play on a plastic-wrapped remote.
“It’s funny that we’re talking about this while watching a samurai flick,” he notes.
Next to the pictures of Yi is a large reproduction of Cha’s reference for the horse: “Santiago Apóstol,” a painting by 20th-century Mexican artist Jesús Helguera of St. James the Elder. Helguera’s heroic renderings of Aztec and Catholic figures are popular source material for Latino tattoo artists in Los Angeles.
Cha stands with portraits he painted of his mentors, a veritable who’s who of L.A. tattoists
Cha’s work can be classified under the umbrella of the black-and-gray style associated with Los Angeles and Chicano culture. He is part of a cadre that includes a veritable who’s who of Los Angeles’ tattooists, and the portraits of his mentors, as he refers to them, line the hallway leading into Cha’s studio: Baby Ray, Jose Lopez, Mr. Cartoon, Jack Rudy, Brian Everett.
The classic themes in the subculture’s tattooing are all represented in Cha’s past work: cars, clowns, skeletons, photorealistic women, religious iconography and a keenly Catholic interest in the mortification of the flesh. The mythological source material hews closely with Cha’s own interests.
“I’m not religious—at all,” Cha clarifies. “But when I first started drawing, I was introduced through the old [Renaissance] masters, and, of course, all their work—the content of what they did—was religious. It’s kind of been embedded in me ever since.”
After about an hour, the client’s leg starts to fall asleep, so Cha suggests a break. The client steps outside to smoke, and Cha checks his email. He’s worked with a couple of local streetwear labels recently, a well-trod path for the successful tattooist. His capsules—the jargon for a full line of apparel, from shoes to hats—allowed him to stretch away from the tropes of tattoo work. One shoe for the skateboarding footwear label C1RCA has a sparse design, going against the density of imagery and line found in many tattoos. Another shoe is primarily a study in texture, despite Cha’s preference for including a narrative streak in his work. For a line that Cha designed for Bobby Kim’s streetwear brand The Hundreds, the young tattooist got to indulge that narrative streak with a series on single mothers in a post-cataclysmic Los Angeles.
The juxtaposition of single mothers and cataclysm isn’t directly derived from Cha’s past, but connections can be made. Cha’s parents aren’t separated, though he mentions he isn’t as close to his father as he’d like to be. The couple had immigrated to South Los Angeles during the 1980s and witnessed the 1992 riots firsthand. Even after the flames had died down, the neighborhood simmered with tension.
“My mom described this incident [after the riots],” says Cha, who was 3 during the riots. “I have this older sister, and people started bugging her in the middle of the street. [My mom and sister were] really freaked out.”
Hoping for more tranquil surroundings, Cha’s parents moved the family further west. But much to the family’s chagrin, in his new neighborhood, Cha started running with the wrong crowd in the largely Latino neighborhood and got into a lot of “stupid sh-t” (he declined to specify). By his late teens, Cha had gotten into enough trouble, including a stint in juvenile hall, that it led to a period of soul searching.
He’d always been artistically inclined, and tattooing was an outlet. Playing with tattoo guns was one of the more innocent activities of his peer group, and Cha had given and gotten tattoos from the time he was 16. He worked out of his apartment for a while, then at a studio behind a barber shop. Cha got his big break when he apprenticed with Baby Ray and then with Jose Lopez, two giants in Los Angeles’ tattoo scene.
“He would spend literally hours right next to my shoulder, just watching me,” Lopez recalls. “There’d be times I’d turn around to grab something, and I’d bump into him! I was like, ‘Whoa, homie, you all right?’ He was just focused.”
Upon the suggestion of Mr. Cartoon, Cha also started taking classes at Pasadena’s renowned Art Center of Design to supplement his on-the-job training with a more academic approach.
“Once he went to school, he really began to mature a lot more,” Lopez says. “He was around people that were giving him good advice, plus he would come over and talk to me.… A little bit of both, I think, really really helped him.”
Lopez also started taking Cha with him to tattoo conventions, where the sight of a Korean kid alongside Lopez was “pretty odd,” he says. “It was a good thing because it attracted people’s attention. And they came around and found out how good of an artist he was.”
Cha’s mother at first wasn’t crazy about her son’s path. Tattooing is still viewed with disdain by Koreans of her generation (see sidebar). But she had fostered his artistic side since he was a child, showing him books of Renaissance artwork and even arranging for him to meet with draftsmen to help develop his hand. He strayed from the arts as a teenager, but once he found his outlet in tattooing, Cha’s mother made peace with her son’s unconventional career choice.
“Once she saw me working hard at it, what I was willing to go through to do it, she was supportive. She really is an awesome mom,” he says, anticipating the next question. “Not awesome enough to get tattooed.”
The afternoon’s client returns from the smoke break. The blood had started to rise to the surface of the skin, giving the horse’s muscles a life-like ruddiness and obscuring the black and gray ink. One client had actually mistaken the redness for an intentional choice, which Cha quickly cleared up. He is pretty strictly a black-and-gray man.
The so-called Chicano style is popular worldwide, and Cha just returned from a trip to Europe with Lopez to attend the Milan tattoo convention. The event was his first since graduating from Art Center. (“Put that in,” he suggests cheerfully. “Koreans will want to hear that.”) Cha penned breathless blog posts about the art he saw.
“The softness of da Vinci’s work in person is flawless. Every object, figure and composition mathematically precise,” he wrote upon seeing some of Leonardo’s work in Florence. Cha may not be the first tattooist to be inspired by classical forms, but he may be one of the most enamored with those sources. The Yi tattoo aside, much of his recent work focuses on specific sculptures of Greek, Roman or Renaissance origin. The trip reinforced his awe for the old masters, and he says it got him thinking a lot about what he sees as the increasing commodification in the tattoo world.
“A large part of the conflict is that I care so much about the art,” he says. “I think [tattooing] is at a point where it can really be something unique in terms of an art movement, rather than the ‘person on a dare’ concept of it. It’s something kind of special, and in a weird way, kind of spiritual, for the client.”
The careful contemplation of symbolism, the permanence of the ink and the hours of pain can make for a powerful—even spiritual—experience.
“So what do you think of tribal tattoos?” the client asks. Cha demurs.“Tribal tattoos are cool. I have friends in New Zealand who do nothing but tribal. That’s where it comes from,” he says. “You know what I’m talking about,” the client chides. Tribal tattoos and Chinese characters are perhaps the most common work done these days, and arguably the most divorced from their original content.
Cha won’t be goaded. “No comment,” he says. From any other tattoo artist, “no comment” might have meant a snicker and a shrug. If a client asks for a meaningless tattoo, that’s just part of the service the tattooist provides.
“Then again, I kind of take things too seriously sometimes,” Cha says. “Maybe it’s not that serious, you know. Tattooing, it is what it is.”
His left thumb and forefinger stay on the client’s skin, stretching it just enough so that he has a taut surface, but not so much that the image will distort when it bounces back. He hasn’t turned off the tattoo gun for any extended period of time during the interview, and his words trail off as he makes another shading pass on the horse’s muscles. His eyes never stray.
• • •
SHIFTING ATTITUDES IN KOREA
Jun Cha’s future plans include a trip to South Korea. It’s mostly an exploratory trip at this point, but he says he’d like to help foster tattoo culture there. “I really want to see the history behind [Korean tattoo] culture,” Cha says. “I know there’s still a huge roadblock there.”
Tattooing in South Korea is defined as a medical procedure, and only doctors are legally allowed to do them. The vast majority of South Korea’s tattoo parlors have been forced underground. Older Koreans still associate tattoos with the criminals who would have their crimes written onto their foreheads. Of late, some young Korean men have taken to getting large tattoos to avoid conscription, as the military maintains a strict no tattoo policy.
But a cultural shift toward acceptance has begun. During the 2002 World Cup, fans got a chance to watch their favorite foreign players, tattoos and all. An additional blow to the status quo was struck when South Korean Red Devils’ striker Ahn Jung-Hwan stripped off his shirt after a goal in 2003, revealing tattoos on his back. Tattoos are also increasingly visible on entertainers, from boy band members to actors. In recent years, nascent organizations like the Korean Tattoo Association have started working! to overturn the de facto ban on tattoo parlors and increase public awareness of the art.
