Tattoo great Ed Hardy got some inspiration from Chinese artwork

People who are familiar with Ed Hardy's colorful fashion designs now have a chance to learn how the artist popularized his tattoo images by integrating historical art styles, including traditional Chinese paintings, in his work.

Ed Hardy: Deeper than Skin, the first museum retrospective of the renowned tattoo artist, will be on view from July 13 through Oct 6 at the de Young Museum, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The exhibition features more than 300 objects, ranging from paintings and sketches to prints and three-dimensional works, tracking the evolution of tattoo from its "outsider" status to a visual art form.

Hardy, 74, is considered one of the most important tattoo artists in the world. He retired from that career in 2008 and is now focused on fine art in his San Francisco studio.

Born in 1945 in Iowa and growing up in Southern California, Hardy developed a passion for drawing in his childhood. He got an undergraduate degree in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute.

He was also passionate about Eastern art and aesthetics, and combined that with an interest in tattoo as an unexplored medium of human expression.

In the early 2000s, he licensed many of his classic tattoo images to a clothing company, and the works became an international fashion sensation.

The exhibit, spanning over 50 years of Hardy's career, starts from images of his first tattoo designs created when he was just 10 years old and concludes with his more recent works incorporating conventional tattoo with traditional fine art.

A key object on view includes Hardy's monumental 2,000 Dragons, a 500-foot-long, 4-foot-wide scroll on which he painted 2,000 dragons. He conceived the idea in 1976, but waited 24 years to complete what he calls his mission to honor the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac.

The project was inspired by the painting Nine Dragons (1244) by Chen Rong, a Chinese painter and politician of the Southern Song Dynasty. Over seven months starting in January 2000, Hardy painted approximately 5 feet of scroll at a time, carefully numbering each dragon in Chinese characters.

Dragons had long fascinated Hardy. He had studied the creatures in Eastern and Western mythology. Since childhood, Hardy has drawn, painted and tattooed thousands of dragons.

The first dragon in the scroll depicts a Chinese myth — a carp leaping over Dragon Gate. The myth has it that if a carp successfully jumps over the gate at the top of a waterfall, it is transformed into a dragon.

In Hardy's image, half of the carp has become a dragon, and the other half is still fish.

Hardy's dragons are depicted in a variety of styles, from Chinese ink to abstract. Some have wings like the dragons in Western mythology.

Painting the scroll with no preplanned composition allowed Hardy to work more spontaneously and on a large scale. He described it as a "decisive turning point" in its scale and expansive gesture — a change from the tight, close work of tattooing.

The paintings and drawings that followed, including a 2012 series of dragon images, are notable for their large scale, dramatic color combinations and energetic brushwork.

Other motifs popular in traditional Chinese art — such as fish, swallows and tigers — as well as Chinese characters are often seen in his designs.

Viewers can also expect to see prints that Hardy created as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, juxtaposed with the master prints that inspired them, as well as tattoo flashes (sample tattoo designs), preparatory drawings and paintings that showcase the theme of Hardy's tattoo imagery integrating with his fine art.

"While Ed is widely known as an iconic tattoo artist, we're excited that visitors will see another side of him and become more familiar with works from his own artistic practice," said Karin Breuer, a curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, who organized the exhibit.