Culture and identity harmonises as a self-expression.
How you demonstrate your personalized vision of
the world with the cultural context that you grow up
with. Heejung Kim noted that, “Individuals favor
possessions, attitudes, and values that embodied
personal-identity and seek to differ from others to
assert and reflect their own uniqueness.” That would
be one way to look at personal expression. But it can
also be defining the connect ion between the
individual and their surroundings.
In other words, it is the social influences the shapes
one’s attributes, including thoughts, behaviors and
emotions. This is a prominent factor in Eastern
culture, where we have China, a communist country
and religions such as Buddhism, whose teachings
aim to help an individual of society reach nirvana, a
realm of internal peace.
These types of beliefs are all self-expression,
regardless whether it is focusing on self-reliance or
community, in all honesty, an individual would
acknowledge their own concept as everyone thinks
differently even if we think we are in the same page.
Our thoughts and feelings are the core of our beings
and we would in some way express it externally.
The way we discover, reflect and express about our
ideas varies through different culture. But they do
have something in common. They can be expressed
through creative means and one of the most
astonishing one of them all is tattoos. Art is a
timeless media, given that it “can be
constructed out of layers of different
experiences and influences”, discovered by
Hwa Young Choi in a investigation in how
social culture crosses through artist alikes.
They are like words in a language, which
continue to evolve yet we could still trace down
the origins solely from their appearances. Like
how most of the English words we use today
would have been borrowed from other kinds of
culture and we can see that from its embark in
history. The interesting thing about tattoos is that
none of them are the same, yet they might have
common values through very different designs.
Individual is strongly advocated without the isolation
of one’s self from their identity in the community. It
allows us to be unique with the understanding of
others within society. It is a symphony of the
subconscious in the human mind and the inner
workings of our belief systems.
It is hard to encourage individual cultural identities
without being the source of divisiveness since each of
us can interpret the same things differently. But that is
what personal and cultural expression is all about. How
we express ourselves, or who we think we are.
Discovering what it means to represent our culture can
affect the person’s own identity and image. In the East,
their customs meant that a lot of was put into
reinforcing the concept of a community. But does that
mean the people have lost their individualism, or
rather, does social roles and relationships define the
individual in expressing themselves instead? Tattoos
helps to bring these two co-related concepts together.
A person’s cultural upbringing and how we individually
see ourselves. The question is, how does tattoos show
the depths of a culture or provide a sense of belonging
to someone in the first place? How does it act as the
unspoken voice of our inner self?
Other factors are concerned as well, such as the sense
of confidence that a person finds within the creative
process, societal influences reinforced in the hearts
and bodies, and lingering traditions that merges with
the modern times and becomes truly timeless.
So how does tattoos, more precisely
Japanese tattoos with a strong
Eastern influence, have an impact
on an individual’s identity based on
their society beliefs and culture. In
this edition, we will be looking at
the cultural, artistic, psychological
views of tattoos, even political
issues that springs from this
particular expression and we will
discuss the function,
purpose and value
behind the ink on your
skin.
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