by Kristine Reynaldo | August 2023
Fig. 1. Whang-Od photographed by Artu Nepomuceno for Vogue Philippines (April 2023).
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 hair white and gray, her skin nut-brown and spotted and wrinkly and covered in faded blackwork tattoos. At 106 years old, she is Vogue’s oldest cover girl. 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 epithets in the hundreds of articles that have been written about her: “ancient,” “iconic,” “legendary,” “living treasure,” “traditional,” “tribal,” “only,” “last.” In stark contrast with the magazine’s cover images for earlier issues featuring young, thin, moisturized, and conventionally attractive bodies wearing fine jewelry, tailored suits, or haute couture, Apo Whang-Od, as photographed by Artu Nepomuceno, wears strings of brightly colored beads, a black spaghetti strap top, a woven skirt, and lingling-o earrings. The costuming for the photoshoot, chosen by the subject herself, emphasizes her indigenous identity and status—but this is Vogue, not National Geographic, and this issue is all about beauty. There are no native huts or rice terraces sighted in Nepomuceno’s studio photographs of Whang-Od. In the cover photo, she is poised, posed against a tan backdrop with the subtle sheen of leather. Her lips are richly painted in oxblood red.
When the magazine issue came out, the dominant tone of its readers was celebratory (Mallari). On social media, Vogue Philippines was lauded 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 skincare and make-up routine, a fitness and nutrition regimen, trips to the department store, spa, or hair salon, etc.) and the regular expenditure of disposable income on aesthetic services and commodities. Here on the cover was no wealthy socialite or showbiz mestiza of the moment, but someone heralded as a bearer of culture, history, and fraught indigenous and contested national identities. As Nepomuceno wrote on Instagram, his cover-making photograph celebrates “the beauty of time, the beauty of family, the beauty of love, the beauty of our elders, and the beauty of being Filipino.” Audrey Carpio, author of the cover story, went further. Narrating Whang-Od’s almost single-handed revival of batok tattooing by freeing it from the strictures of tribal customs and 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 indigenous way, “can be seen as a step toward decolonizing aesthetics, reclaiming our bodies, and reconnecting with our roots, our selves” (Carpio 132). That batok has also seen a revival among diasporic Filipinos is a testament to this longing for a pre-colonial identity, so largely erased by the colonizers that it must be excavated and reconstructed, if not invented, labeled “Filipino,” and then shrouded in nostalgia and mystique—as is evident in the way Vogue describes Nepomuceno’s photographs as “authentic and pure” (The Vogue Team), or when Carpio evokes the notions of “sacred markings,” “tradition,” and “heritage” to emphasize how “an indigenous tattoo … carries with it a long history” and a culture that “survives through representation, not appropriation” (132). What such lofty pronouncements mean, or how busloads of tourists alighting in Buscalan to get tattooed constitutes decolonial praxis, are not very clear, though they sound very nice.
What is clear in Carpio’s article is the commercial nature of contemporary batok tattooing and of Vogue’s representation (“not appropriation”) of Whang-Od, both of which are justified as necessary for the survival of not only the practice but also its practitioners in the capitalist present, where cultural forms, whether “highbrow” or “lowbrow,” “traditional” or “contemporary,” have been commodified. From her description of the infrastructural developments in Buscalan and the changes in local society, space, and economy brought about by Whang-Od’s fame, to her quotation of the anthropologist Analyn Salvador-Amores on the appropriation of indigenous expressions by mass consumer-oriented popular culture, Carpio’s article reveals a keen awareness of “the transactional, touristy nature” of getting batok as an outsider (Carpio 131), an awareness that gives rise to complex feelings, acknowledged or otherwise, about the tattoos, about Whang-Od’s celebrity as recognized and magnified by the Vogue feature, and about the tensions between effaced pre-colonial indigenous culture and imagined post-colonial national identity and desire (for patrimony, a rooted sense of identity, global recognition, Filipino pride, etc.). In other words, Vogue’s feature on Whang-Od and the discourse it has generated domestically and internationally are expressive of longstanding debates concerning tradition and modernity, and the tensions between the indigenous, the local, and the national, as these are influenced by the flows of global culture and capital.
In this light, we may consider responses that were not so celebratory of the Vogue feature, responses that, instead of simply celebrating an enlarged notion of beauty represented by Whang-Od on the cover, raised the issues of cultural appropriation and commercial exploitation, which are less about the cover per se, and more about the broader context of contemporary batok tattooing and the controversies surrounding it. In 2021, for example, Israeli content creator Nas Daily was lambasted for offering a paid online course on “The Ancient Art of Tattooing,” supposedly to be taught by Whang-Od, in violation of The Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997, which requires the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Cultural Communities/Indigenous Peoples (ICCs/IPs) in all matters related to Community Intellectual Rights. In a press release, the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) emphasized that Nas Academy, despite signing a contract with Whang-Od, “must follow the procedure [mandated by laws on traditional knowledge] since the art of tattooing is not practiced by the Butbut ICCs/IPs alone” (Republic of the Philippines). Similarly, in 2017, Manila FAME, one of the Philippines’ biggest international trade shows for lifestyle, fashion, and household products organized by the Department of Trade and Industry, was criticized for flying in Whang-Od from the Cordilleras to tattoo hundreds of people over the course of two days in the World Trade Center. According to a report by Rappler, attendees at the trade fair were charged “P2,500 for a tattoo, P500 for a signature (3 tattoo dots), and P700 to see Whang-od” (Serafica and Rey). Details of the trade show, including photos of Whang-Od looking tired, went viral on social media, prompting many, including the president of the Philippine Tattoo Artists Guild (Philtag), to decry the event as blatant “exploitation” and “commodification” of Whang-Od and her culture, even as “reminiscent of the Philippine Exposition at St Louis World’s Fair in 1904” (Serafica and Rey). In the words of Salvador-Amores, who has written a book on tattoos and Kalinga society, a “fitting” and “respectable” way to honor the Butbut elder is
to listen to Apo Whang-od’s voice, her thoughts and her stories … But having to tattoo from 8 am to 4 pm for the event and have a ‘piece’ of her is way too much, there should be a limit for these tattoo demonstrations. How is this setting different [from] when she tattoos in Buscalan with more than hundreds of visits per day … ?
Indeed, how was Whang-Od tattooing hundreds of urbanites at Manila FAME different from Whang-Od tattooing hundreds of urbanites at her village? The examples detailed above, relating to the commodification of indigenous culture in the context of a digitally mediated and corporatized global knowledge economy in the first instance, and of state-led development projects in the second, illustrate the tensions and contradictions that Whang-Od symbolizes, inhabits, and negotiates: indigeneity as a collective identity that historically has been marginalized under both the colonial and post/colonial nation-state, and indigeneity—and its related terms, “ethnic,” “traditional,” “ancient Filipino” (an oxymoron, if you think about it)—as a valued brand for marketing the nation’s cultural products to consumers worldwide. Sometimes, it is the members of indigenous communities themselves who practice such marketing—as in the case of the Butbut tribe and Whang-Od promoting “the tatak Buscalan, tatak Kalinga” (Carpio 132), and sometimes not. To what extent IPs benefit from such representation (or appropriation?) of their culture is a discussion that has no end.
Critics, for example, have pointed to the hypocrisy of celebrating—on the cover of a magazine meant for the consumption of the Westernized, metropolitan, English-speaking, educated upper-class—one “token” or exceptional representative of the country’s IPs, more popularly known as Lumad, while keeping mum on the manifold injustices they face: poverty, land dispossession, development aggression exacerbating natural disasters, and state violence, including red-tagging, unlawful arrests, killings, the closure of lumad schools, and the aerial bombing of lumad communities (Diño). IPs who resist the destruction of their communities and ancestral domains by extractive industries and development projects (e.g. mining, logging, megadam-building, the conversion of agricultural or forested land to subdivisions and high-end resorts) promoted by the state and big business risk murder or the slower death of deprivation. Meanwhile, IPs who present friendly smiles and Instagrammable images of indigenous culture find themselves on the covers of glossy magazines. As Alice Sarmiento wrote in her review of 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].”
The Manila FAME incident and the Vogue Philippines cover, when juxtaposed, illustrate another contradiction: that of Whang-Od as an aesthetic laborer, and of Whang-Od—or at least, the publicity images made of her, which define our notion of her person—as an aesthetic product.
In an interview, Nepomuceno shared that his visual references for the Vogue photoshoot included photographs of Whang-Od taken by Jake Verzosa and Francisco “Paco” Guerrero (Valezka). Versoza shot a series of portraits titled The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga, which has been exhibited at Silverlens Galleries. It was printed as a photobook by German publisher Steidl in 2017, with the portrait of Whang-Od on the dust cover. Guerrero, meanwhile, photographed Whang-Od for the cover of the tenth issue of travel-oriented GRID Magazine. Though different in genre, given their contexts of production and circulation—Versoza’s portraiture is interpreted as visual art, while Guerrero’s is seen as more straightforward commercial work—both cover images document Kalinga culture, embodied by Whang-Od, as a way of celebrating it and rescuing it from the colonial stigma of the “savage.”
Fig. 2. Whang-Od photographed by Jake Verzosa for The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga (2011).
Fig. 3. Whang-Od photographed by Francisco Guerrero, GRID Magazine no. 10 (October/November 2015).
These portraits by Verzosa and Guerrero are not unique; if one searched for images of Whang-Od, especially those from before the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, and the explosion of vernacular photography that these technologies have enabled, one would most often see Whang-Od made to signify either an “indigenous woman” or as a mambabatok of sigils passed down from generation to generation over centuries. Both signifieds carry the burden of orientalist tropes, communal interests, and narratives of ethnic identity and cultural legacy.
Fig. 4. Whang-Od photographed by Allan Barredo, “whang od: kalinga's last mambabatok,” Lantaw, 3 Mar. 2013, https://www.lantaw.com/2013/03/whang-od-kalingas-last-mambabatok.html.
Fig. 5. Whang-Od photographed by Polish-born Adam Kozioł, “Kalinga,” Koziol Gallery, 2013, http://www.koziol.gallery/kalinga. Kozioł’s photographic project is to document tribal cultures in Asia and Africa.
Fig. 6. Whang-Od photographed by Farlet Vale. Scanned pages from Lane Wilcken, Filipino Tattoos: Ancient to Modern (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2010), pp. 28–29.
The above implies that the images produced of Whang-Od have often been framed by an anthropological perspective. Not so for the Vogue cover. Nepomuceno, by his own telling, dehistoricized his photographic encounter with the subject, instead coloring it rosy with nostalgia. He asked himself, “How would I want to photograph my grandmother now if she was still around?” (The Vogue Team). The Vogue cover portrays Whang-Od as emblematic of a more “inclusive” notion of the beautiful. Yet this brand of beauty is not truly democratic, not rid of the mantle of glamour. John Berger memorably defined “glamour” as “The happiness of being envied” (Berger 172), which is what drives the economy of “publicity images” (a.k.a. advertising), whose function is to manufacture glamour to entice consumer-spectators into buying things and experiences that promise to make them the object of others' envy. Another way of saying this is that Whang-Od came to be on the cover of Vogue because she is exceptional. She came to be exceptional because the amount and scale of the attention that the circulation of her images commands makes her so. And Vogue needed someone exceptional on the cover because it has to sell.
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