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

(Text revised, Sep. 3, 2025)

This painting originates from traumatic experiences in my early life in China. Growing up meant escaping the most insidious force I knew: a mother’s love. While my mother had admirable qualities, her pathology—her repressed shadow self—left indelible marks on my understanding of the world.

Earlier, I recognised her in Chi-chiao (曹七巧 ) from Eileen Chang’s The Golden Cangue*. Later, she emerged in Varvara Stavrogina, and even more disturbingly, Pyotr Verkhovensky from Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed*.

Understanding my mother helped me understand my “motherland”—China in the 1990s—a nation reshaped from the debris of the Cultural Revolution, caught between Communist ideology and emerging market capitalism. It was a "motherland" where ancient civilisation had descended into inauthenticity and intellectual desolation. Through my relationship with my mother, I saw the destructive aspects of femininity, the ressentiment and inferiority complexes underlying group dynamics, political power struggles, and insincerity in art and culture. My family life mirrored what I later observed in broader society.

A common thread links my mother's relationship with me to her relationship with her country: both involve symbiotic fusion. Psychologically, she sees no boundaries between herself and others—neither her daughter nor her country. Having failed to complete the separation-individuation process in childhood (psychic separation from her caregiver), she transferred unresolved symbiosis onto me. Her emotional landscape was unstable, marked by panic at perceived abandonment and dependence on others for internal stability. My attempts at autonomy were existential threats, triggering manipulation and emotional turmoil.

Similarly, during social and political instability, people often surrender critical autonomy, emotionally embracing collective ideologies without conscious examination. They no longer think—they echo; no longer feel—they react. Immune to reason, they become extensions of ideological systems. The dissolution of the individual into the mass signals the collapse of civilisation.

The so-called “Communist China,” at its darkest, was characterised by pervasive ressentiment, fear and ignorance—conditions epitomised by the Cultural Revolution. Fear bred dependency, eroding individual autonomy, while ressentiment fueled suspicion and conflict. Oppression served as fear’s mask: as insecurity intensified, people sought ever tighter control over those on whom they depended, perpetuating cycles of power struggles. These struggles gave the rulers a deceptive sense of security—a textbook “divide and rule.” The same pathological dynamic pulsed between family life and the wider society. I call those trapped in this circuit of fear, control and ressentiment “inferior predators.”

My mother, forged during the Cultural Revolution as a Red Guard, cast herself as a perennial victim—professing devotion to others while convinced she was perpetually wronged. She internalised a power complex: obsequious to authority, ashamed of her weakness, yet clinging to a wounded pride. She ingratiated herself without limit, only to resent the humiliation it invited. She surrendered all her reason to the whim of the Collective. Her identity was outsourced to an amorphous 'Them'—a chorus of borrowed values and judgments. Beneath her compliance seethed envy and volatility. With me, her only child, she claimed a domain of unchecked control. I became both her prey and her prop, absorbing her self-loathing and voicing her unspoken rage. Within the family, she unconsciously reenacted the persecution she had once endured and inflicted: distorting facts, fostering fear, sowing discord, and subjecting me to public humiliation, isolation, belittlement, gaslighting, constant surveillance, emotional blackmail, beatings, and even mutilation—all under the banner of maternal sacrifice.

Yet despite everything, she left a deep imprint on my artistic sensibility. Her distorted sense of beauty—shaped by the totalitarian aesthetics of the Cultural Revolution—repelled me so powerfully that it defined my taste by opposition. I developed an aversion to “kitsch,” a term I first encountered in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera described kitsch as the aesthetic of collective emotional dishonesty: "the absolute denial of shit (the negative)." He also called it the “second tear”—sentimentality so excessive it feigns profundity. A totalitarian state, he argued, is the reign of Kitsch in its purest form. Kitsch isn’t just bad taste or sentimentality; in times of upheaval it functions as a psychological defense, rejecting complexity and reality in favor of emotional comfort.

“My enemy is kitsch, not Communism!” says Sabina in the novel. Tellingly, I share Sabina’s pattern of “betrayal”—her refusal of fixed identities, her suspicion of sentimentality, her pursuit of freedom even at the cost of isolation. Like her, I instinctively resist kitsch and conformity. Yet I also recognise myself in Tereza—drawn to kitsch by her naïveté, emotional idealism, and longing for meaning and purity.

My mother could never be alone. She constantly needed the presence of others, yet her relationships followed a single script: "I hate you, don’t leave me." Her generation was raised by the state and the collective rather than by an intimate family; for her, the crowd itself was the mother. She longed to merge with it, breathe with it, and be seen by it. In reaction, she unwittingly gave me a precious counter-gift: a love of solitude, the interior space essential for serious creative work.

Does love—or at least its violence—mean remaking the other in one’s own image? I’ve come to see that a mother’s love can carry a narcissistic undertow: the child not as an individual, but as a possession, an extension, a mirror. What I found most unbearable was not the cruelty, but the pretence—the performative affections, the ornamental emotions, the staged sincerity. My mother never spoke naturally; for her, life itself was performance. She craved an audience, so she made me a “child star.” She projected her kitsch ideal onto me and demanded that I live it. I became a puppet—stripped of natural feeling, trained to act, to mimic, to perform. What the State did to her, she did to me.

Throughout my adult life, I've struggled to escape her shadow. Yet, purging her projections leaves a disquieting void. I find myself questioning whether I can feel authentically, love genuinely—despite my longing for intimacy. A cruel paradox—for what is art if not the sincere expression of human feeling?

N.B. My childhood perception of my mother may starkly differ from an outsider’s view. Varvara Petrovna in The Possessed initially appears benevolent—an image her son Stavrogin would dispute. Dostoyevsky noted: "A despot herself, she obeys her despotic son," reflecting uncannily my relationship with my mother today. Childhood perceptions distort yet illuminate reality uniquely. In my case, the darker aspects of my mother’s character provided a visceral understanding of evil—indispensable to my creative work.

*Chi-chiao (曹七巧): resentful, ignorant woman crushed by feudal patriarchy; Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina: despotic, narcissistic mother figure; Pyotr Verkhovensky: nihilistic psychopath driven by power and destruction.