The comic aims to be part of critical debate, encouraging my peers to question the power and the reality around us and to seek ways to reshape it, for our future.
'I PRAY FOR A KIND OF DEATH' is a comic that focuses on the confused, angry and desperate generation of young people in mainland China.
This book starts with the common, recognisable childhood memories of contemporary Chinese youth. It uses the author's favoured visual narrative technique (montage) and found texts, such as fragments of film scripts and dialogue to implicitly convey that contemporary young generation is oppressed and brainwashed by the regime. Thus deriving their views on the political environment through unfounded suspicion, leading to anger, helplessness and despair in the environment of communication and lived experience.
The author thinks the reason why people often miss the old days and their childhood time does not mean that those days are necessarily perfect days, nor does it mean that those times are necessarily good times. For herself, she miss those days because she was just observing the world as a "child". At that age when we were not fully educated, didn't feel compelled by the torrent of the times, and didn't open our eyes to see the world, we were protected in an ivory tower by our parents, schools, etc. So that time is pure and still feels hopeful for the future at that time.
Then she used Freud's concept of the "death instinct". The death instinct is also known as the destructive impulse. He believes that the death instinct is an innate urge to destroy order and return to a pre-life state.
There're many times when we want to go back to this state. It doesn't mean that I want to go back to childhood, but that I wish to enter into a kind of backtracking, to find a kind of peace back to the mother, back to before the human, back to the time when the universe was not yet formed.
The publication aims to awaken some pioneering young people and trigger and encourage critical and independent thinking developing in the gap between China and the world's mainstream ideology.
