An Oneiric Lap

Yuhuan Zhang
Watercolor and acrylic drawing, 2020

“Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible—painting scrambles all our categories, spreading out before us its oneiric universe…”
— Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind

This painting reflects the microcosm of my universe: my fading body, my growing, energetic daughter beside me, and our beloved cat, Mimi, with a dying bird between her teeth. The portrait creates an isolated space, yet suggests an expansion into infinity. It is a threshold where life and death, dreaming and waking, force and resistance meet.

The white body appears asleep. Its solidity and stillness suggest death. It fades into the surrounding ground. The pale outline that traces her against the whiteness of the paper makes her vulnerability visible: she is a mother, but also a body that is weakening and disappearing. The energy of life is carried by the child’s movements: a bouncing leg, a moving hand, an open mouth, and an intense gaze. The presence of one animal subduing another makes death palpable. The small bird in the cat’s mouth is dying. Its fragility evokes a sense of loss, yet life continues.

The daughter appears in orange-red, a vivid, dancing force circling the mother’s recumbent form. Her halved body suggests speed, like that of Shiva, the creator of life, whose dance brings creation into being. Her vivid color is not simply a sign of vitality; it is the heat of a life becoming her own. The energy that seems to circle or pass over the mother belongs to the next generation, but the daughter is not merely the mother’s future. She has her own way of seeing and her own presence, and both change the meaning of the maternal body. Her forward gaze and open mouth seem to begin a conversation with the viewer.

The dying bird in the cat’s mouth seems to speak through her cold, silent gaze. With stealthy paws, the cat emerges from the misty cloud and glides swiftly through the mother’s body. Something unsettling passes between the figures in this moment.

Merleau-Ponty writes that painting “scrambles all our categories,” opening “its oneiric universe” of embodied, mute meanings (Eye and Mind). This portrait reflects that dreamlike instability. Yet the image is not necessarily a private dream; it reflects our deepest wonder about life and the two formidable, unwavering truths we must confront: time and death. Is this a dream, or a state of mind detached from the world? Or should I ask whether there is anything at all? As Merleau-Ponty also writes, “Nothing is left of the oneiric world of analogy.”