The Melting Face
The Melting Face
Africa was next, via Germany, with a few guests spots turning into a stint in Cape Town during the middle of the year, “when it was fucking freezing”.
Vu remembers South Africa fondly with the youth, like in Japan, “just being down to get whatever… so you get to try out all your experimental shit”.
It was here that another of Vu’s signature tattoos was born – the melting face.
But it’s also my personality in these designs to, whether it be these distorted faces, a smiling face, or a sad face, it’s a representation of some sort of emotion gone wrong, or gone right, or whatever.”
youtube embed goes here!
Adam Vu Noir - music by Tim Gray
As Vu connected with his creativity he closed his eyes to traditional influences in an attempt at tapping the well, focusing instead on the things around him and art history.
“I love surrealism, I love Cubism, I love… I never thought I’d say this, modern art. But now I’m starting to like modern art because the older you get you start appreciating these things. It’s an acquired taste.”
Vu continues: “But then you start seeing it reflected in the designs you start drawing and it mixes with your personality and therefore you’re creating your own art. A good artist, this is a bit of a cliché thing to say, but a good artist steals from a bunch of artists, and a bad artist steals from one. And if you steal from a bunch of shit… stealing is an art form in itself because if you’re able to do it and put your identity in stolen shit then you did something right. We all do it. Anybody who says everything they do is original, I find that very fucking hard to believe.”
At Cape Point, the very tip of South Africa, Vu along with a crew of other tattooists – Nicholas Mudskipper, the owner of Tomb Tattoo, David Chasten and his wife Rose and David Floris – hand poked little alien heads on each other “on this magical day”.
Hand poked tattoos in Cape Point, South Africa
youtube embed goes here!
I remember having one of those weird existential moments, where you sit on this edge of a mountain, this edge of a continent, looking over the clouds. And I was like ‘fucking Antarctica, it’s right there God-damn-it’, I knew I was going to make it."
But he almost didn’t.
Vu got arrested at the airport as he tried to leave. At a concert the night before his friend got into a fight and as Vu attempted to pull “this crust-punk guy” off his mate “my hands went into his jacket and kind of like on instinct, I felt a packet of smokes so I grabbed them”. Concealed amongst the tailor-mades was a joint.
“In most third world countries you can bribe your way out, but this was an international airport, so I was like, ‘I’m fucked’.”
Strip-searched, handcuffed and detained in a room, Vu began to panic. “They told me I should call a lawyer. That I was probably going to end up doing five years in prison, or some shit. At this point I was thinking I’d rather have my family think I had died than end up in an African prison, for a joint. And literally that excuse, ‘that’s not mine’, has never worked in the history of anyone being found with drugs.”
Instead of calling a lawyer, Vu called Nicholas Mudskipper, who got on the phone with the officers “and basically cut a deal”. He’d tattoo them for free and Vu would give them whatever local currency he had left.