Elya Element

Being a digital artist for the past few years and traveling a lot around Asian countries, gets inspired by oriental traditional culture and changed medium to sculpture during pandemic time.

For the past few years I was traveling a lot around Asian countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Philippines and China and always get inspired by oriental traditional culture.

My story begins when I decided to spend a year of my life in China and moved to Beijing in 2019 and started to work in tattoo industry in one of the well-known tattoo academies in China. I was teaching young Chinese talents and worked as a tattoo artist as well. After Chinese New Year the whole world turned upside down, lots of people lost their jobs, lots of foreigners had to return to their homelands. But I stayed in China, started to work with students online and living in total lockdown for three months. That was the started point for my creativity.

I spend a lot of time diving into oriental tattoo culture (which is quite ancient), studied history and traditional subjects of Japanese and Chinese tattoo art. It’s not a secret that Japanese tattoo style is quiet popular in China, and image of Demon Hanya is one of the most common subjects.

At the same time during pandemic I was talking a lot with young generation of Chinese people and that was a unique experience. I learned a lot about their interests, we discussed tattoo culture of western and oriental countries. I was surprised how they are trying to adopt western trends, but at the same time staying stick to traditional culture. I was thinking about this paradox a lot and starting to see this trend everywhere around me, especially when I moved to Shanghai in 2020 and started to work on my art piece.

Hanya Mask project was born because of the pandemic and become the reflection of my research of oriental tattoo culture and Asian contemporary social trends, which I did during lockdown, having an opportunity and time not only to study the subject, but also change the medium.

Hanya Mask sculpture was inspired by mythological Japanese character of demon Hanya, often depicted in traditional Noh and Bunraku plays using a wooden mask of a fierce and grimacing horned demon and widely used in tattoo culture, may be Japan’s most well-known demon. This piece shows a reflection of subjective view on development of Asian contemporary culture and interweaving between traditional art and western trends.

Medium: Sculpture: Clay, acrylic paints, Swarovski rhinestones, decorative elements. Stand: Wood, acrylic paints. Size: approx. 33*20*20cm