... AND SO MY LIFE BECAME A FUNERAL:
MEMORIAL TATTOOS AND THEIR STORIES

Introduction

Rin Jung, a Brooklyn-based multimedia researcher, independent documentary filmmaker, and tattoo artist, and Matt Wallenstein, a Pittsburgh-based writer, poet, and tattoo artist are collaborating to offer this interdisciplinary tattoo art project focused on sharing and caring the experience of grief and loss through the creation of memorial tattoos.

... AND SO MY LIFE BECAME A FUNERAL: Memorial Tattoos and Their Stories hopes to provide an artistic experience of embodyng the physical and emotional transmutation of remembrance and mourning. Through this project, we discuss grief, mourning, and the feelings of missing those we remember, while also sharing memories and celebrating their lives. We hope to reframe our understanding of encountering death of someone in our lives as a significant experience of carrying on and remembering meaningful memories and moments that now accompany Us in the lives we have left to live, rather than viewing it as a damage and loss where the person is gone and has left us for good.

The Story

I started this project while reflecting on the memory of my close friend, who passed away almost four years ago. She was an incredibly important person in my life—almost like a life mentor. The day after her passing, I had a tattoo appointment scheduled, originally intended for a design of white chrysanthemums. Coincidentally, white chrysanthemums are the flowers traditionally brought to funerals in Korea, where I’m from, to mourn and remember the deceased. The tattoo was done by Matt, the artist who collaborated on this project, and also a close friend of my late friend. The tattoo became my personal memorial for her, allowing me to carry her memory with me always. When I wrote the eulogy for four years ago, I gained a deeper understanding of how to approach the death of a loved one. I wanted to view mourning not as a way of letting them go forever, but as a process of integrating both their life and death into my own. As long as my life continues, I will remember them, and their memory will live on within me.

The title of this project comes from a quote in Han Kang’s novel Human Acts: “After you died, I could not hold a funeral, and so my life became a funeral.” This resonates deeply with the reason people get memorial tattoos. Even when a formal mourning ritual is completed, there are often unresolved matters—things we couldn’t say soon enough, things we couldn't do to process the experience, the grief that doesn’t end. And memorial tattoos offer a way to continue that mourning throughout our lives. They become a medium we continue the mourning through which we carry the meaning and memory of the deceased on our bodies.

In this project, I also explored the ideas of spectral realism, hauntology, ghosts, and memory—particularly after reading Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination by Avery F. Gordon and Haunting without Ghosts: Spectral Realism in Colombian Literature, Film, and Art by Juliana Martínez. These works examine how memories of the departed, or their "spectral" presence, resist the violence of erasure and oblivion. I interpret this "haunting" as any act of remembering the dead, and I wanted to understand the ritual of getting a memorial tattoo as a way of doing justice to that memory. It provides a physical space for remembrance, ensuring that those who have passed continue to live on in the lives of the living.

Any tattoo artist has probably worked on a memorial tattoo at least once in their career. These tattoos are more than just designs—they create an embodied shrine, a lasting tribute to those whose deaths have become part of our lives. Therefore, the artists who create them, play a vital role in the experience of mourning, grieving, and remembering. With this project, we hope to create a space where these emotions and thoughts can be shared and expressed, ultimately transmuted into a tattoo that honors and preserves memory and life.