The Inferior Predator
自卑的捕食者
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 originates in the traumatic experiences of my early life in China. For me, growing up was about running from the most insidious force I knew: mother’s love. While my mother possessed many admirable qualities, it was her pathology—her deep-seated perversity—that left the most indelible marks on my understanding of the world, an understanding that persists to this day.
Earlier, I saw my mother in the character of Chi-chiao from Eileen Chang’s The Golden Cangue.* Later, I found her in Varvara Stavrogina, and even more disturbingly, in Pyotr Verkhovensky from Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed.*
Understanding my mother also allowed me to understand my country—China in the 1990s, a nation reshaped from the debris of the Cultural Revolution, caught between an archaic Communist ideology and the emerging forces of market capitalism. This was my “motherland,” where 5,000 years of Chinese civilisation had descended into a state of unparalleled inauthenticity and intellectual desolation. Through my relationship with mother, I came to perceive the destructive and devouring aspects of the feminine, the ressentiment and inferiority complex that define group dynamics, the power struggles that underpin politics, and the false sentiments that permeate art and culture. What I experienced within my own family mirrored what I would later see in society and the world at large.
“Communist China,” as I understand it—more accurately a term for the latter half of the 20th century than today—was, in its extremest periods, ruled by an overwhelming sense of resentment and fear, fed by ignorance. The Cultural Revolution’s attack on civilisation and education was ignorance at its peak. Resentment fuelled constant conflict, while fear bred dependence, eroding individual autonomy. The more fearful people became, the more they depended on others, and the more control they sought over those they depended on, believing that this would secure their safety. Often, the more intense the struggles between the controlled, the safer the controllers felt––divide and rule. This pathology spread from family life into society, and from society back into the family, I call those trapped in this cycle of resentment, fear, and ignorance “inferior predators.”
My mother, forged in the fires of the Cultural Revolution and once a Red Guard, perpetually cast herself as a victim—insisting that she lived solely for others, while everyone else owed her, neglected her, and tormented her. Ever the loser in the power struggles that ruled her existence, she was brainwashed and manipulated into believing herself persecuted and powerless, her identity consumed by an all-engulfing hatred and jealousy. The only domain where she could exercise total control was over her only child. I became both her prey and her emotional crutch. Within the family, she unconsciously reenacted the very persecution she had either endured or inflicted: sowing discord, distorting facts, provoking fear, subjecting me to public humiliation, isolation, demeaning, gaslighting, constant surveillance, emotional blackmail, severe beatings, and even bodily mutilation.
Yet, without realising it and entirely against her will, my mother became a significant shaper of my artistic sensibilities. She instilled in me a profound aversion to kitsch—what Milan Kundera termed the “second tear,” superficiality and artificial sentiment. She also gave me an insatiable desire for solitude and retreat into myself, both of which are vital to my creative pursuit.
A mother’s love, I have come to believe, is often tainted with narcissism: she sees the child as a possession, a weapon, an emotional outlet, an idealised object, and a projection of herself. What I found most unbearable about my mother was her intense desire to pretend and her distorted sense of aesthetics—shaped by the Cultural Revolution and its propaganda art—steeped in excessive sentimentality, superficiality, grotesque affectation, and, above all, a profound insincerity. She relentlessly imposed her ridiculous ideals upon me, using me to show the world her desired self. In so doing, I was reduced to a puppet, stripped of any natural feeling, constantly imitating, pretending, and performing.
Throughout my adult life, I have been trying to shed mother’s shadow. Yet as I painfully purge her projections from my psyche, I am left with a disquieting void. I now find myself questioning my capacity to experience authentic emotions or form genuine attachments, despite my aversion to kitsch and insincerity. What a cruel paradox! For what is art, if not the expression of sincere human feeling?
N.B. My view of my mother, constructed through the eyes of a child, may stand in stark contrast to an outsider’s perspective. Much like an initial reading of Varvara Petrovna in The Possessed, who might be seen as generous and benevolent—an image her son Nikolai Stavrogin would likely dispute. Our childhood perceptions often distort reality, yet they also offer profound insights. In my case, the negative aspects of my mother’s character have provided me with a deeper understanding of evil, and this understanding has become indispensable to my creative work.
*Chi-chiao (曹七巧): a resentful, ignorant woman crushed by a feudal patriarchy; Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina: a despotic and narcissistic mother figure; Pyotr Verkhovensky: a nihilistic, power-hungry psychopath bent on destruction.