I've always been fascinated by the independent artistic underground movement due to the possibility of being able to create outside compulsive market logic that tends to guide the artist towards mandatory concepts of "trend".

In my recent interest in Chinese Manhuas, I stumbled upon this gem. A dark story with vaguely ancestral and Buddhist hues.

Hell Scroll (地狱变相) by Xi Liu is the tale of a king who lives in a non-human realm as we are immediately told, poised halfway between earth and heaven, in a realm of spirits who, however, can die.

It's not clear to me whether the author has somehow taken from Buddhist iconography.
I did some research driven by this work to understand the Buddhist conception of hell discovering a very complex world.

I've always thought monotheistic religions were difficult but the substrate of Hinduism and Buddhism - and the two sometimes converse - is a mythology worthy of an epic.

Our protagonist - an evil king full of perversions, was born impure with the desire to see his kingdom transformed into a living hell. His sexual depravities lead him to kill every woman with whom he has intercourse, until one of these - as did Salomé - concocts a way of salvation thus becoming the queen of the kingdom.

But our king, never satisfied with hatred and ferocity, then decides to set fire to his Buddhist temple by burning monks alive for entertainment in order to be able to see the reactions of a holy monk (a chosen one) who has the eyes of the Buddha. After a night of dialogue and the king's attempted rape of the monk, the executioner bleeds to death going to hell (according to the monk's words), but going there with joy.

The Buddhist hells are multiple and we are not given to know how much Christianity has come into contact with Buddhism since the descriptions of the Italian Dante Alighieri are somewhat similar.

But while the Christian hell has no escape route, the Buddhist hell is a redemption, a moment of suffering to obtain purification and get out of the cycle of samsara.

The work has very few dialogues, it is more like a fairytale, almost a parable handed down by Burmese monks ready to scare you.

The artwork annihilated me with its beauty, an almost Vedic pictorial with negatives in stoner sauce where the lotus flowers shine the sun is omnipotent, the ephemeral faces, they all look like paintings ready to engulf a drugged brain.

Aesthetically, the only comparison that comes to mind is with the Japanese anime Mononoke, but here the dominant colours are black, gold and white.

Xi Liu's debut is a rare lotus pearl that deserves visibility and attention.

90 out 0f 100.