Tatatau 2

You are probably wondering why I am taking the trouble of talking about a person such as Dr ‘Okusitino Mahina when the issue at hand is concerning tattooing or tatatau. Well, I mentioned earlier that Tongan culture and therefore arts is an intricate weave of elements that are interdependent. And Dr. Mahina’s work has been and is an attempt to unravel this complexity. Parts of the Tongan cultural weave are lost to our knowledge and experience and Dr. Mahina’s work attempts to understand these lost entities. He does this by attending to the implicit and tacit elements professed to be at work primarily behind our language.
Dr. Mahina has constructed out of this a Tongan understanding of time and space that is essential to the recovering of a lost philosophical system implicit in the ways Tongans and also Polynesians thought about themselves and the world. Time and space here is understood as ta (time) and va (space). Though these essentialities are professed to uphold everything that we know of, I am going to focus only on some aspects of its compatibility – especially in terms of where our thinking should be in our attempts to recover parts of our culture that are lost in time, e.g. tatatau.
I should also say that what I am doing as a tattooist isn’t entirely a focus on recovering tatatau; rather, I am merely doing tattoos because I love it and love the creativity involved. My work isn’t about recovering tatatau first and foremost. I came up with the term ‘Urban-Kupesi’ because I want it to speak for my work in the sense that it isn’t about just doing Polynesian patterns but also expanding the skills to other type of imageries. The ‘urban’ stands for modernity in perhaps the widest interpretation – modernity as cultural imperialism, as colonialism and post, as urbanization, as diaspora, as contemporary, and etc.. The ‘kupesi’ stands for the philosophy that is behind the idea of art in a Tongan sense.
Kupesi is a term used in Tongan art to speak of the patterns and motifs in ngatu or tapa, it is used in the traditional art of lashing or lalava, it is also used in genealogy and many other aspects of our culture. To elaborate on how both terms come into contact and how they reference my work would take an entire book so I won’t here. All you have to know is, ‘kupesi’ for me is a concept which incorporates the philosophy of art in a Tongan sense in looking out at the present.
Dr. Mahina’s work though is a very complicated labor rooted in both traditional Western philosophy and Tongan thinking. Everything that exists for Mahina consists of ta (time) and va (space). And a good introduction to this theory you’d have to find it yourself in the internet, especially at Nuama.org. The space and time of this moment isn’t enough for me to elaborate. There are many other artists and writers of Tongan descent who has taken on this theory in their work. However, I only wanted to use Dr. Mahina as an example of how the process of recovering aspects of our cultures and re-utilizing it to re-tell stories of our identities….2bcont..