Humans, Beasts and Ghosts. 

 

This painting borrows its title from 錢鍾書 Qian Zhongshu’s short story collection, serving as both a reflection and an abstraction of my inner journey during a decade of migration to the UK. The experience isn't just a geographical relocation it felt and feels like a blurred death and a rebirth, a disintegration, and reconstruction of identity.

 

Language, behaviour, image, cognition - everything had to be relearned. Like a grown-up infant, I had to figure out how to survive again. Even something as simple as sucking for milk became a metaphor for disorientation: the position was always wrong, the hunger never satisfied. Through this process, I began to sense the shifting presence of the human, the beast, and the ghost within me.

 

The human embodies the desire for structure, reason, and belonging - an ideal form shaped by social order. The beast speaks through instincts and impulses, unfiltered, raw, and uncontrollable. The ghost hides within, made of unresolved emotions that transform again and again - from malice to sorrow, sorrow to guilt, guilt into longing and, ultimately, into a transparent, drifting sense of self.

 

In Qian Zhongshu’s Human, Beasts and Ghosts, these three figures reflect layers of human existence: the human as the rational, socialized ideal; the beast as the unconscious drives beneath the surface; and the ghost as the shadow of what cannot be contained - hypocrisy, resentment, obsession, and fantasy. They are not opposites, but overlapping forces that co-exist and shift within us.

 

As a grown-up infant in a new society, I found myself fragmented across these three states. In the early stages of migration, with language barriers and cultural misalignments, I could not function as a “human” in the social sense. I survived by mimicking, observing, and guessing, attempting to participate in systems I didn’t yet understand. In the silence of misunderstanding, primal emotions - anxiety, fear, rejection, desire - rose like a beast, ungoverned. And when I began to adapt on the surface, those instincts didn’t vanish; they were simply repressed and reabsorbed, quietly mutating into the ghost - a sense of dislocation and longing, neither here nor there, haunting and half-formed.

 

In this new world, I had to learn again how to eat, speak, look, smile - how to express, conceal, and choose. And in the spaces between these learnings, I saw the human, the beast, and the ghost taking turns, overlapping, morphing, becoming reflections of each other.