Dec 19, 2010

demonic chinese ladies

i was really excited when tris picked the topic of asian monsters. here's a big sketch dump i did. since everyone wants to do something japanese, me and shelley thought it would be cool to draw chinese monsters. chinese mythology is really vast and not a lot of westerners know too much about it.
狐狸精 or huli jing, is a fox demon. its where the japanese got their kitsune from. not much different from each other (actually pretty much exactly the same), huli jing is a fox spirit, sometimes with nine tails. they can transform into ladies and seduce men. supposidly, a huli jing seduced the last emperor of a chinese dynasty and brought his downfall.

fun fact, huli jing is actually a slang for "whore" in cantonese. obviously came from the fact that they were fox demon ladies who seduced men.

here is 白蛇传, lady white snake or in cantonese bak seh. this is a very popular chinese tragedy about a scholar who marries a mysterious lady. it turns out she's a demonic white snake who can transform into a lady. she's actually a good person and really wants to be with this scholar, but a demon hunter hunts her down and imprisons her into a tower for all eternity.


僵尸 or jiang shi is a chinese vampire. originally, they sucked "chi" which is life force out of a human. western influences made it drink blood. jiang shi is really just a reanimate corpse. supposidly priests could control them by sticking a yellow piece of paper into their heads, with the word 符 or fu on it. jiang shi are the result of improper burials or unfair deaths such as suicide and murder.

interesting story.
supposidly back then, transportation was dangerous and expensive and chinese people could not afford to travel long distance to bury their dead. yet for some odd reason, everyone had enough money to hire a taoist priest. according to the legend, taoist priests would reanimate a family's corpse for them and actually lead them to their proper burials. jiang shi like bamboo for some odd reason and a taoist priest would dangle a bamboo stick in front of it and lead it on at night.

bottom line, it sucks to live in the chinese countryside....

or the malaysian countryside. i have a lot of friends living or from malaysia. they all speak cantonese so i do plan on visiting malaysian sometimes. apparently, malaysian vampire stories come out of the impoverished countryside. i drew a pontianak (don't know the chinese writing)
it first appears as a lovely lady. then it reveals to be a grotesque severed head with its entrails sticking out (what). its supposed to be a soul of a lady who died of childbirth. it has a knack for babies and little kids and it goes around chasing little children. shelley told me they used to scare her as a kid.
in fact, ALL malaysian vampires only prey on babies and little kids. that's just depressing.



lol i plan on submitting a second wave, a lot more happier stuff. not all chinese monsters are scary. i don't know. me and shelley were talking about chinese vampires, so i thought why not.

1 comment:

Shelley said...

'白蛇传' (bai she zhuan) = 'legend of the white snake', not her name. :B love your rendition of her and the jiangshi, nice and monstrous-looking!

penanggalan are the ones with the dangling viscera, methinks, I believe pontianak is a more general term for a female bloodsucker. I also don't think it's just babies and kids, I distinctly remember some stories where the pontianak played the role of seductress in the form of a beautiful woman, and killed the young men she lured in.
either way, not anything I care to encounter last thing at night!