Chris "Horishiki" Brand

Archive Note

Chris Brand grew up in the Los Angeles area in a household his interview describes as artistically supportive, with parents who supplied early anatomy reference books and Japanese pop-cultural material, and an older brother whose drawing pulled him toward art as a child. At age fourteen he entered a Hollywood makeup-effects apprenticeship. He moved from there into tattooing through a sequence of L.A.-area mentors, learning the trade first from Tom Tilden, Mark Mahoney, Joe Vegas, and Mike Brown.

He became a regular at Tattoo Land, the East Los Angeles studio that sits in the lineage of Good Time Charlie's Tattooland. There he was mentored by Jack Rudy, Lil Roy, and Stan Corona, and absorbed a strong Chicano black-and-grey foundation. That training, the fine single-needle black-and-grey of the East L.A. shops, is the base the rest of his work is built on. Chaz Bojorquez, the L.A. calligrapher and figure in Chicano visual culture, is cited as a heavy aesthetic influence.

In 2013, at State of Grace Tattoo in San José, Horitomo (K. Kitamura) conferred the Hori-name Horishiki on Brand. The Japanese American National Museum's Perseverance artist biography records that he received the title Horishiki from Horitomo in 2013, and the artist's own news archive at cbrandworks.com supports the same account. Horitaka, founder of State of Grace and a co-mentor to Brand in the Japanese-tradition orbit, was the host of the venue but did not take part in the formal bestowal. An earlier interview framing of the naming as a joint act by two mentors is most plausibly a compression of "Horitaka and Horitomo," and the solo-Horitomo account is the one the institutional records carry.

Brand's signature work is the long-form project he calls "108 Heroes of Los Angeles," also described as a Chicano Suikoden. It re-stages the 108 outlaws of the 14th-century Chinese novel Shuihu Zhuan, known in Japanese as Suikoden, as a contemporary L.A.-mapped backpiece cycle. The project swaps the novel's traditional weaponry for local signifiers, shotguns in place of axes, and assigns each hero to a specific Los Angeles cultural-geographic context. By his interview account it runs across a roster of more than twenty committed clients, each carrying one of the 108 as a backpiece. That count is a snapshot figure and will keep growing toward the project's titular 108.

He works under a deliberate restriction of palette and materials. By his own statement he uses Talons washes and Dynamic Black exclusively for his black-and-grey work and rejects what he describes as overcomplication of pigments. The stated intent is a tattoo that holds up over decades on skin rather than one optimised for short-term photogenicity.

The tattooing sits inside a wider art practice. Brand carries his earlier Hollywood makeup-effects training into wood carving and 3D sculpture, and from the early 2000s he has been a member of UGLARworks (Unified Group of Los Angeles Residents), a Los Angeles collective of visual artists rooted in river and street art who serve as pre-certified muralists for the city. Brand was selected for Perseverance: Japanese Tattoo Tradition in a Modern World, the touring exhibition organised by the Japanese American National Museum, placing him among the few contemporary American tattooers whose work has been shown in a major museum context. His record stands at the VERIFIED tier, a documented account of one tattooer mapping a Japanese narrative cycle onto Chicano Los Angeles.

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