Artist Statement

不妒—良藥即毒藥

Good Medicine is Poisonous

The animation talks about a girl whose body is transforming into a monster as her jealousy grows. The priscription written by the weird doctor swapped the girl and the monster living in her inner world, putting the girl into a dangerous situation.

The monster the girl transformed into is inspired by a creature in “Over the Mountain and the Sea”. A creature called Lei looks alike a bob cat, grown with hair like a human does. It is both ying and yang itself. People who eat its meat would no longer feel jealous again. Reading about Lei in the book, I start thinking a lot about this mythical creature. How can the meat of this creature change the mind of a person? Is that the creature carries a kind of serum that can cure jealousy. Itself being both ying or yang - is this related to that jealousy more often occurs between people of the same sex etc.

Over the Mountain and the Sea is called the prescription and medical recipe of the ancient China. The process of creating this animation is also a process of curing my own sickness.

When I was younger, I did a bit better than kids of my same age in terms of my hobby drawing. I grow under appreication and appraisal from others. My dream grows bigger and I have a lot of imagination and expectation to my own future.

I was taught to be humble and appreciating others; jealousy is evil and bad. I wanted to be “good”. Other people usually tend to lean towards stronger people, but I act oppositely. I easily feel threatened as it seems one step closer to the more shinning people would makes myself burn into ashes. In the meantime, I still keep contact with my old friends, but I know clearly how my heart feels pain. Every time when they share with me new things they achieved, I had to congratulate them and appear to be graceful, while actually I don’t want to know how much was I lagging behing. I hate every time I can’t geting a satisfying painting. I hate the friends who don’t understand me being “forced to stop moving forward due to other matters in my life”. I am ashamed of myself due to my jealousy. These make me feel suffocated when I face the canvas because the emptiness of it make my mind bleed with dark and evil thoughts. I really hate myself being that weak and cheap. I could neither purely appreciate beautiful works from others, nor could I draw unrestrainedly and happily. I let other tasks and plans filled up my life, and I became distant from drawing. I avoid talking with those friends, although they were willing to come to me. I changed my goal so that I did not have to stay on the same runway with my friends, causing my brain to automatically make comparison.

I doubt my passion. Do I merely enjoy being prasied by others? If the passion is illusion, what is the happiness I got while I was drawing alone when I was small? And yhy would I be that painful and depressed now?

I was intermittenly thinking about this kind of stuff these few years. I also made some new friends in the university who are truely talented and charming. I would still feel jealous, yet I would like to cherish my new friends, as if I can rebuild relationship with my past friends. I don’t wanna deny myself and stuck there reminiscing how failed I am. I want to conclude the change in myself within these four years and face what jealousy really is. In most of the tales related to it, like Cain and Abel, the Golden Apple, or Caocao killing Ouyang Xiu, the image of jealousy is the source of evil and conflicts. Is it really the origin of evil? Why would jealousy exist? In this animation, I want to view this “sin” from a new perspective.Jealousy is not a sin.

The animation has only reached the midway of my thinking process. Lin found her friend, choosing to hurt her. Indeed, Lei is not the incarnation of jealousy, but the desire to eliminate it. No matter what happen, it got to make Lin being “not jealous” anymore. In my point of view, borrowing the power of Lei, Lin can also reaching the heights of the ideal self temperary - to remind herself of the potential and possibilities she had in herself which she had once strongly believed.