Bold. Jarring. Colourful. Edgy enough to pierce your flesh - be it the pores on your bicep or your eardrums – punk rock and tattoos have much in common. Nowhere in the world have the two bled into each more murkily than China, where such art forms are now free flowing after years of clinching taboo. They both converge on Qingdao-born, Beijing based Spike (Li Yang), who has a sleeve of ink running up and down his arm. Those tattoos are easily visible as he darts across the stage while fronting his punk troupe Demerit, which will showcase that edgy ethos at Yugong Yishan on December 17.

“It looks different from ordinary people,” Spike says of the image overlapping in both punk and tattoo cultures, before summing that idea up in one breath: “Rebel peace.”

Unlike Westerners - for whom such trends are far too common - the kind of tattooed Bejingers that will mosh at Demerit’s show still raise many of their neighbours’ eyebrows. One of the world’s chief ink aficionados says that’s because many Chinese still have a very traditional attitude about the punk image. 

“Until recently, most developed societies, including China, regarded tattooing as some form of perversion,” says Chris Wroblewski, a British photographer who has published 21 books full of his tattoo-themed pictures, including 2008’s China Tattoo. “[The idea of tattoos] sat uncomfortably with Confucianism, (which) pronounced against the desecration of the sacred body.”

If that’s the case, then Spike is a proud ink masochist. His favourite tattoo stretches across his left forearm - an ambling zombie, clutching a peace dove in his left hand and firing with a laser gun from his right.

“The dove is carrying a wheatear in its beak, but in the mean time, the laser gun is radiating with its cold light,” the singer says of the tattoo. “It means peace is just bulls---t, there is only shameless lies. That is also exactly what we [Demerit] want to express on our last vinyl.”

The cover of that album, 2008’s Bastards of the Nation, is a bold enough image to join the mass of tattoos on Spike’s arms. It’s a gnarly drawing of the CCTV tower with a jagged gap in its middle that nearby swaying cranes have yet to fill. The music mirrors that grisly image. On “Beijing is Not My Home,” Spike sneers lines that should be whispered like “Oh mama, mama, tell me where can I sleep tonight?” amongst drums that throb harder than freshly-inked flesh. 

But any shared imagery between the music and tattoos is lost on Wroblewski. “I can't see the connection, unless you consider tattoos to be stage makeup. It seems to have become a fashion accessory that can be removed with a laser once the novelty wears off,” Wroblewski says, as if to spite the bizarre ray-gun wielding zombie on Spike’s forearm - the sort of style that’s chic now when it was once risqué.

But Dong Dong, who runs Beijing’s famous Mummy Tattoo Parlour, disagrees with Wroblewski, saying conformity is still the norm in Beijing.

“A tattoos is extreme, it’s personal, it’s straightforward,” he says of how inked skin mirrors the minimalism of punk songs. “I guess punk rock people have very strong feelings toward life and society. These feelings need a way out ... They get tattooed not really because they need it for a memory of someone, or to write down their girlfriends' names. They want something on a spiritual level.”

Those more elaborate, eccentric, and personal styles are a sign of evolution in Spike’s eyes - even if his traditional neighbours aren’t so open minded.  

“Old people may feel a little unusual about punk and tattoos,” he says of brazen punk fashions, before adding that he knows one elder wise enough to be so accepting. “My mother is better, [she] just let me stop following usual patterns. She did not think I was bad boy.”

Demerit

RMB 50, RMB 40 (students). 9.30pm. Yugong Yishan (6404 2711)

Photos: Demerit, Chris Wroblewski, Dong Dong