In many societies, the body has long been a surface where meaning is inscribed—through scarification, tattooing, adornment, or ritual gesture. The permanence of such marks stands in sharp contrast to the fleeting, digital landscapes that now dominate contemporary life. Into this space steps Eric Chan, an artist whose work illuminates the human body as an archive of cultural continuity and personal expression. His journey provides a striking example of how ancient traditions of calligraphy adapt and persist in new contexts, carrying with them both the weight of heritage and the promise of reinvention.
Chan, who was born Chan Chun Hong, was educated in Hong Kong, attending La Salle College before earning a degree in computer science at the University of Science and Technology. From such functional tech studies it is ironic that what endured for Eric wasn’t the programming logic so much as the programmer’s discipline applied to his artistic passions. Calligraphy remained the constant, first on paper, then on skin as Chan’s artistic path carried him toward tattoo work.
What sets Chan apart is not simply that he practices calligraphy in an age when fewer young people pick up the brush. It’s that he has chosen to carry this discipline into tattooing, a medium often dismissed in the Chinese cultural mainstream as marginal, even disreputable. The shift is not without risk. In much of East Asia, tattoos remain tied to the world of triads and outlaws. For Chan, the act of inscribing sacred texts onto the body, like the full-back Heart Sutra he once completed for a client, is both radical and intimate. It requires not just technical mastery but also trust in the hours of shared silence punctuated by conversation about life, death, and the meaning of permanence.
Rather than present tattoos as rebellion, Chan treats them as living manuscripts. He talks about his art less as ornament and more as archive, each mark recording the story of a person in a way no diary could. That perspective moves his work closer to anthropology than to fashion. Tattoos, in his view, become a social document written under the skin.
Chan is explicit about his larger mission: to take Chinese culture abroad. Moving to the United States is not just a career shift, but a statement. He wants to show audiences who may not read Chinese a way to feel it and to experience its rhythms and weight through form alone. This ambition resonates with his own mantra, inked onto his thigh: “grateful.” For Chan, every encounter, whether frustrating or inspiring, has shaped his trajectory. Gratitude is not decoration; it is method.
It was Chan’s distinctive blend of cultural depth and technical precision that caught the attention of Bang Bang Tattoo, the Manhattan studio with near-mythical status in the global tattoo world. Known for catering to an international clientele and appearing regularly in Vogue, The New York Times, and GQ, Bang Bang is as much a cultural institution as it is a studio.
Not surprisingly, Chan was recently tapped to join their ranks. The studio is notoriously selective, curating its artists with the same care that galleries use to assemble exhibitions. Inside, tattooists are treated not as artisans but as auteurs, each with their own signature voice. For Bang Bang, Chan’s addition represents more than technical skill—it signals a willingness to expand beyond precision and prestige, to embrace an Chan’s unique approach to tattoo artistry.
And simply put, there’s a paradox at the heart of Chan’s artistic approach. He wants to bring calligraphy to the world at large, yet what he produces is resolutely personal, bound to one client’s back or arm, never reproducible. The art disappears into private lives. Perhaps that is precisely the point: in a world obsessed with scalability, here is a craft that insists on intimacy.
The anthropologist Victor Turner wrote about liminality being the thresholds where people are remade. Chan’s studio is one such threshold. Clients arrive with vague ideas or private burdens. They leave marked, permanently, in ways that blend Chan’s cultural inheritance with their own stories. The body becomes both page and witness, proof that meaning can be inscribed in an age when almost everything else scrolls away.
