Photography by Artu Nepomuceno for Vogue Philippines (April 2023), image from Teyxo.
In April 2023, VOGUE Philippines published their seventh issue, which, so to say, made a splash around the world. On the cover was the kind of woman hardly ever seen fronting fashion glossies: her white hair streaked with gray, her skin nut-brown and spotted and wrinkly and covered in faded blackwork tattoos. The woman’s (Christianized) name is Maria Oggay, but she is better known as Apo Whang-Od—and to this name is often attached other distinguishing epithets: “ancient,” “iconic,” “legendary,” “traditional,” “treasure,” “tribal,” “only,” “oldest,” “last.” In stark contrast with the publication’s cover images for other issues featuring young, thin, moisturized, and conventionally attractive bodies wearing fine jewelry, tailored suits, or haute couture, Whang-Od, now 106 years old, wears strings of colored wooden beads, a black spaghetti strap top, a woven skirt, and dinumog earrings. The costuming for the cover emphasizes her indigenous identity—but this is VOGUE, not National Geographic or Anthropology Now, and this issue is all about beauty. There are no native huts or rice terraces sighted in her studio photographs. She is poised, posed against a tan backdrop with the subtle sheen of leather. Her lips are luxuriously painted in oxblood red.
When the magazine issue came out, the dominant tone of its readers sounded celebratory. They lauded the editors for making such a bold choice, defying ageism, colorism, and various codes of beauty that are rooted in privilege and realized through disciplinary aesthetic labor (a ten-step Korean skincare and make-up routine, a gym membership and fitness regimen, manicures and massages and haircuts, etc.) and the regular expenditure of disposable income on aesthetic commodities. Here on the cover was no fashionable socialite or showbiz It Girl of the moment, but a bearer of culture, history, fraught indigenous and contested national identities. As the photographer Artu Nepomuceno wrote in an Instagram post, his image celebrates “the beauty of time, the beauty of family, the beauty of love, the beauty of our elders, and the beauty of being Filipino. … what this means for our country and as humans together is even greater.”1 Audrey Carpio, the author of the cover story, went further. Talking about Whang-Od and her almost single-handed revival of batok tattooing by freeing it from the strictures of tribal customs and sacred rituals and making it accessible to outsiders for a monetary sum, Carpio suggested that Whang-Od’s popularity, drawing crowds raring to get inked the “traditional” way, “can be seen as a step toward decolonizing aesthetics, reclaiming our bodies, and reconnecting with our roots, our selves.”2 That batok tattooing has also seen a revival among Filipinx in the United States and elsewhere is perhaps a testament to this longing for a pre-colonial history and identity, so largely erased by the colonizers that it must be imagined and reconstructed, if not invented and mythologized.
But there were other voices in the hubbub of responses, voices that were no less reverential of Apo Whang-Od, but were not so celebratory of the Vogue feature. Some of these voices raised the issues of cultural appropriation3 and commercial exploitation,4 which are less about the cover and more about the broader context of the practice of traditional tattooing in the capitalist present. In Whang-Od’s girlhood, ritual scarification was a mark not only of tribal identity, but of honor brought to the tribe. Men had to prove their martial prowess before meriting a tattoo (some tattoos, like eagles across the chest, were reserved for specific manifestations of valor, such as a successful headhunt). Women, on the other hand, earned their tattoos upon puberty. Their tattoos enhanced their attractiveness, signifying their family’s wealth and status (for then, as in now, tattoos did not come cheap), their fertility, and their capacity for enduring the pain of pregnancy and childbirth. These days, however, anyone with a few thousand pesos (though it cost only a few hundred pesos ten years ago) could get a Kalinga tattoo.
Other critics pointed to the hypocrisy of celebrating—on the cover of a magazine meant for the consumption of the Westernized, metropolitan, educated upper-class, no less—one “token” or exceptional representative of the country’s indigenous peoples (collectively known as lumad) while turning a blind eye to the manifold injustices faced by the lumad, such as poverty, dispossession of ancestral domains, development aggression exacerbating natural disasters, and state violence, including unlawful mass arrests, murders, the closure of lumad schools and the aerial bombing of lumad communities.5 As Alice Sarmiento wrote in her Rappler article on Vogue Philippines’s April 2023 issue, “What demands confronting is how such levels of economic prosperity and cultural visibility [accorded to Whang-Od, and by extension her community in Buscalan] can sit side-by-side with the unsexy systemic issues of uneven development and extraction that confront many indigenous Filipinos – including the Butbut [tribe].”6
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Scans from Filipino Tattoos: Ancient to Modern by Lane Wilcken. Photos by Farlet Vale.
I’ve met Apo Whang-Od thrice. The first time, she gave me my first tattoo, back when trekking to Buscalan wasn’t a thing conyo college freshmen did over the Christmas break to get batok and get wasted on bugnay. I didn’t come there to get a tattoo, but to accompany a friend who sought one from Apo. But while hanging out in Whang-Od’s relative’s hut, I found a copy of Filipino Tattoos: Ancient to Modern by Lane Wilcken,7 an American sociologist and tattoo practitioner with roots in the Philippines. I ended up getting inked with one of the sigils pictured in the book: the ginawang or hawk motif, messenger of the gods. I received the tattoo early in the morning of New Year’s Day many years ago. Whang-Od started tapping the tattoo, then stopped halfway, and had her grand-niece and protegé Grace Palicas finish it. That I got the tattoo on the first day of the year, that it was half-done by Apo and half-done by her successor, and that the tattoo was this particular symbol had great personal significance to me back then. But now I realize how inappropriate it was for me to pick an indigenous tattoo from a book written by a Nevada-based Filipinx instead of looking to the mambabatok for guidance. The ginawang is actually an Ifugao motif, not Kalinga (the ethnic group from which Whang-Od hails). But that didn’t seem to matter to either Whang-Od or Grace, who worked from 6 AM to 6 PM that day to cater to the requests of tattoo tourists, many of whom also picked their “traditional” tattoo designs from a sheet of paper tacked on the wall.
Although batok is often framed in magazine features, travel blogs, and documentaries as “intangible cultural heritage” if not a threatened and highly spiritual and rarefied art, what struck me in my sojourns to Buscalan was the quotidian labor of it. Hand-tap tattooing (batok) is a physically demanding practice, much more than modern machine tattooing, both for the giver and the receiver of the tattoo. And yet here was this 90-year old woman (Apo was around 90 when I first encountered her) hunched over other people’s bodies all day with her stick and thorn and charcoal ink, “clocking in” and “clocking out,” working diligently and steadily, mostly in silence save for the steady tok-tok-tok of her tattooing stick. The day after I got my ginawang inked, Apo took a break from tattooing. When I asked Grace where she was, Grace said she was back in the fields, farming. Indeed, in many interviews, Apo Whang-Od has talked about pambabatok as just a job that puts food on the table, even as she expresses hope that the cultural practice would live beyond her.
L: Photo by Allan Barredo, 2013. R: Photo by Adam Kozioł, 2013.
If one searched for images of Whang-Od, especially those from before the ubiquity of smartphones and social media, one would most often see her depicted as either a tribal woman (as in the preceding photos), or a tribal worker, a traditional tattoo practitioner enmeshed in other relations of kinship, cooperation, and competition in the community (as in the photos from Wilcken’s book above). That is to say, her image has usually been framed anthropologically. In more recent years, with the circulation of images, narratives, and knowledge produced about her, her craft, and her village, Whang-Od has also become something of a tourist attraction—and photographed as such. I have viewed dozens of such tourist photographs with Whang-Od, and rarely have I seen her smiling in them.
The last time I visited Buscalan in 2016, I asked to take a photo with Whang-Od, something I hadn’t had the chance to do before. She hesitated initially, then let herself be coaxed into it. Grace who was with us translated what Whang-Od said: she didn’t want to be photographed because she felt that she wasn’t beautiful anymore. (According to local gossip, Whang-Od in her youth was famed for her beauty, and men would fall all over themselves to curry favor with her by, for example, making sure her household was never out of chopped wood for kindling)
With Apo Whang-Od and Grace in Buscalan, 2016.
That memory informed my initial reaction to the Vogue pictorial. For sure, the magazine is a commercial enterprise that peddles consumerist fantasies and products by adopting a feel-good liberal “progressive” stance in representing beauty, glamor, and feminine strength. I understand the context for why some people are offended by its commodification8 of a cultural icon who belongs to a historically marginalized population, and whose tattooing practice has been insufficiently honored by the gatekeepers of national culture and artistry due to it having the “taint” of profit-making.9 But this I also know: I’d never seen Apo Whang-Od smile like she did for that magazine feature. She seemed genuinely delighted to be a Vogue girl—beautiful, empowered, modern. It’s such a departure from the usual ways in which she has been depicted. And yes, she is a bearer of history, culture, fraught indigenous and contested national identities. But also, sometimes Apo Whang-Od may just want to be Maria Oggay.
Notes
- @artunepo, Instagram, April 1, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/CqdfBStPLdS.
↩︎ - Audrey Carpio, “Apo Whang-Od And The Indelible Marks Of Filipino Identity,” Vogue Philippines, March 30, 2023, https://vogue.ph/magazine/apo-whang-od/.
↩︎ - See, for example, the 2021 controversy over Nas Daily offering a steeply priced online course on batok tattooing supposedly to be taught by Whang-Od — without the consent of either Whang-Od or the Butbut tribe. https://www.cnnphilippines.com/news/2021/8/4/Nas-Daily-Whang-od-Academy-backlash.html
↩︎ - As in the 2017 FAME Trade Show held at the World Trade Center, where Whang-Od was flown in from the Cordilleras to tattoo some 200 lowland city people over the course of three days. https://www.bworldonline.com/editors-picks/2017/10/25/66064/art-appreciation-appropriation/ ; https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41717665
↩︎ - Niña Diño, “Dwindling numbers: Lumad schools continue to suffer closures, attacks during pandemic,” Rappler, September 18, 2020, https://www.rappler.com/moveph/lumad-schools-continue-to-suffer-closures-attacks-coronavirus-pandemic/
↩︎ - Alice Sarmiento, “The Mark of Buscalan: Whang-Od, Vogue, and difficult conversations,” Rappler, April 11, 2023, https://www.rappler.com/life-and-style/arts-culture/mark-of-buscalan-whang-od-vogue-difficult-conversations/
↩︎ - Lane Wilcken, Filipino Tattoos: Ancient to Modern (Schiffer, 2010). ↩︎
- As of writing, the April 2023 issue is sold out; if you wanted to buy a copy from secondhand markets, you would need to pay three to four times the magazine’s original retail price.
↩︎ - Analyn Salvador-Amores, “Whang-od as a brand name,” Rappler, October 25, 2017, https://www.rappler.com/voices/imho/186345-wang-od-brand-name-tattoo/.
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tenant on the top floor 