The woman in the photo is not smiling – and she doesn’t have to. A network of thin dark lines covers her face from forehead to chin, applied decades ago in the Chin State mountains. Her eyes are closed, and in this lies the complete peace of someone with nothing to hide. It was with such a meeting – a chance encounter in 2001 in southern Chin State – that the project began, which German photographer Jens Uwe Parkitny has been pursuing for a quarter of a century. From October 14th to 17th, his works will be shown at the AIA Khit exhibition space, located in the restored colonial halls of The Secretariat in Yangon.
Three Traditions That Can No Longer Be Repeated
The exhibition “Myanmar’s Untold Tattoo Stories” brings together three independent series: facial tattoos of Chin women, leg tattoos of Kayin men, and ritual markings of Manawsaitopat order healers. Together, they constitute, in essence, the only comprehensive photo documentation of Myanmar’s tattoo traditions, which have either already disappeared or are recorded fragmentarily. This is not a collection of “exoticism” – it is a cultural archive that, once the last carriers are gone, will cease to be replenished.
To an outside observer, the facial tattoos of Chin women were long perceived as deformation or “ugliness.” Within the communities themselves, the meaning was the opposite: the patterns indicated belonging to a specific group, social status, beauty, and spiritual protection. Different South Chin groups had their own patterns – from dense solid fields of ink to fine geometric lines and dots. The tradition has not been passed down for several decades, and the women who carry it are elderly. Parkitny’s portfolio remains the only known complete photographic record of this phenomenon.
Ink as Proof of Courage
The photographer began the second series – the leg tattoos of Kayin men – in 2014. The markings were applied from the waist to the knees and served as a rite of passage, a sign of coming of age, and a confirmation of bravery. As with the Chin faces, the practice has practically disappeared: the men who still wear these tattoos belong to the last generation, and Parkitny’s portraits document them while they can still be found.
The third series is the least known. Since 2016, Parkitny has been photographing members of the Manawsaitopat order, Myanmar healers whose lineage dates back about 250 years. Here, tattooing is not decoration. It carries rank and healing power, is part of initiation and protection practices that few outsiders have seen up close. Alongside the three main series, the exhibition also features contemporary photographs of protective motifs, showing how the old belief in marking the body for protection lives on in Myanmar today.
Trust is More Important Than the Shutter
It is worth mentioning the method separately. Parkitny has been traveling through Myanmar for twenty-five years, often defying both politics and geography. Many portraits are built on relationships established over years, others on trust earned in a single brief encounter. The result is a quiet, unhurried style: the subjects are not presented as ethnographic curiosities; their dignity speaks for itself. Parkitny’s visual language echoes Edward Curtis’s ethnographic portraiture from a century ago, although the photographer himself discovered it independently – he only found Curtis’s works when the Chin portraits were already well underway.
His photographs have been exhibited abroad since 2004. Key shows include a solo exhibition at the Bavarian State Museum of Ethnography in Munich (2010), large-scale projects “Tattoo” at the Gewerbemuseum Winterthur in Switzerland (2013–2014) and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg (2015), a solo exhibition at the Pataka Art + Museum in Porirua, New Zealand (2014), which was visited by over 36,000 people, as well as invited shows at the Asia Society Hong Kong (2009), Goethe-Institut Myanmar (2016), and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand in Bangkok (2024). Now, for four days, this work returns to Yangon – the country where it was created.
For the tattoo community, this project is important not as “exoticism from Asia,” but as a reminder that tattooing is one of the oldest forms of body writing, where a line carries meaning, not just aesthetics. In an era when tattooing has become a mass decorative market, such archives restore its ritual dimension: here, each pattern is an identity, status, protection, and memory inscribed on the skin. And the fact that these inscriptions are captured by a photographer who spent twenty-five years building trust, rather than just arriving with a flash, makes the material irreproducible. In a generation, these people will be gone – only Parkitny’s frames will remain, and this, perhaps, is the main price and the main value of this exhibition.