The Inferior Predator
Oil on canvas
146 x 97cm, 2018
A smelly bitch that has brought forth plenty of young, already rotting in places, but that to me in my childhood meant everything, who I am quite incapable of disciplining, but before whom I shrink back, step by step, shying away from her breath, and who will end up—unless I decide otherwise—forcing me into a corner that I can already see, there to decompose fully and utterly on me and with me, until finally—is it a distinction?—the pus- and worm- ravaged flesh of her tongue laps at my hand.
— Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
This painting comes from my traumatic early life in China.
For me, to grow up is to escape from the most malevolent force: so-called “Mother’s love”.
I got to understand my own mother pretty well. Her pathology and her perversity. And by understanding her, I came to understand the country I grew up in, China in the aftermath of Communism: my so-called “Motherland”, where Chinese civilisation was at its most inauthentic and illiterate.
Based on my own experience, Communist China was ruled by Ressentiment (the Nietzschean concept) and Fear. Ressentiment caused constant conflicts and struggles, while fear created dependency and rid one of individuality. The more fearful one was, the more dependent one became. The more dependent one became, the more control and power one sought to grab from those they depended upon. Thus, a sickening cycle developed: the more fierce the struggles that people below were having, the more secure the people above felt. Such vicious blood ran from the state to the individual. I call those resentful and frightened people “the inferior predator”.
My mother, a product of the Cultural Revolution, always felt herself standing at the powerless end of the power struggles. Brainwashed, insulted, and injured, she was a victim of oppression whose entire being was devoured by passionate hatred and jealousy. Consequently, her only child, whom she had absolute power over, became her only prey. The home turned into a place where she unwittingly re-created scenarios reminiscent of those that had wounded her. Her methods were similar to those of the state: to divide and isolate, to sow discord and incite, to inflict fear, to humiliate, to confine and control, and to use physical violence and mutilation, etc. What I found the most intolerable, however, and what eventually caused my rejection and escape, was what she thought was “beautiful” – artificiality and falsehood in the extreme – and her ruthless forcing of her “ideals of beauty” on me.
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.”
(Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse)