Nezha, Rebel with a Cause
Reflecting on The Unfaithful Octopus: Image-Thinking and Adaptation
My Own Words is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.
Ian Tee, 爹爹，我把骨肉还给您 (detail), 2023, destroyed aluminium composite panels, 8 panels, each 150 x 120cm; acrylic on wall. Installation view in The Unfaithful Octopus (2024) at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Photo by Phuping Tankasem.
Admittedly, feature-length films are not my thing. I am rarely able to commit to watching movies in their entirety and often look at spoilers before deciding if I wish to proceed. Yet, I found myself eagerly awaiting the release of the Chinese animation film Ne Zha 2 哪吒之魔童闹海 (2025). Written and directed by Jiaozi, it is a sequel to Ne Zha 哪吒之魔童降世 (2019) and a liberal adaptation of the titular character’s story from the 16th-century novel Investiture of the Gods.
The figure of Nezha has been an obsession of mine for the last few years. He is a protection deity in Chinese folk religion, and lives in the cultural imagination through his appearance in countless performances, films, and video games. Nezha is often depicted as an androgynous, mischievous child with extraordinary powers and a strong sense of justice. Like the many storytellers before me, I am drawn to Nezha as a symbol of youth and of righteous rebellion.
In 2023, I was invited by Roger Nelson to create a work for the travelling exhibition The Unfaithful Octopus: Image-Thinking and Adaptation (2023-2024). In his curatorial essay, Nelson describes the show as an attempt “to reckon with the kinds of image-thinking that artworks do, focusing on how art thinks about other art… as well as how art thinks about narrative and time”. It was the perfect opportunity to work through this obsession and ruminate on the evolution of Nezha’s story. His mythological roots can be traced back to Indic origins, but I am most interested in the 1979 children’s animation Nezha Conquers the Dragon King 哪吒闹海 which is the adaptation that cemented his image in popular culture.
Ian Tee, 爹爹，我把骨肉还给您 (detail), 2023. Installation view of handwritten artwork title in The Unfaithful Octopus (2024) at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum. Photo by Phuping Tankasem.
What I hope to do with this essay is to once again enact this exercise of image-thinking, and discuss my work 爹爹，我把骨肉还给您 (2023) in The Unfaithful Octopus in relation to Ne Zha 2 and Nezha Conquers the Dragon King. For those who have not watched Ne Zha 2, be warned that there will be spoilers! The title 爹爹，我把骨肉还给您 translates to “Father, I return my flesh and bones to you”, and it is an iconic line uttered by Nezha before his sacrificial suicide. In the 1979 adaptation, this act depicted subtly but unambiguously, shows Nezha bringing his father’s sword to his neck before the scene cuts to the bloody sword landing on the floor. Rewatching it today, the scene remains shocking as an explicit portrayal of death in a children’s animation film.
爹爹，我把骨肉还给您 is a meditation on the moral complexity around Nezha’s suicide and the implications of this “cut”. Though written in the Ming dynasty, Investiture of the Gods is a romanticised retelling of the decline of the Shang dynasty and the rise of the Zhou. At its core, it is a novel about tides of change in the earthly and heavenly domains. One could even say that it is about revolution.
Against such a backdrop, Nezha is a radical character. In the 1979 cartoon, he is a folk hero fighting for the people against the tyranny of gods such as the Dragon Kings, as well as a figure who went against Confucian social hierarchies. Nezha’s action of returning his flesh and bones to his father can be interpreted as a severance of his relationship and karmic debt to his parents. I argue that this is the most consequential gesture as it allowed Nezha to be reborned in a more powerful form.
Ian Tee, 爹爹，我把骨肉还给您 (detail), 2023. Installation view of panels depicting Nezha, exhibited in The Unfaithful Octopus (2024) at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Photo by Phuping Tankasem.
My work appropriates Nezha’s suicide scene from the 1979 animation. The image is cut into aluminium panels using an angle grinder, evoking the more graphic description of his death in the 16th century novel where Nezha took a knife and peeled his flesh off his bones. This visceral sensation is captured in Jiaozi’s Ne Zha 2 where Nezha’s body is shredded into hundreds of pieces as he tries to overcome the Heart-Piercing Curse 穿心咒 at the film’s emotional climax.
Though evoking a similar imagery, the narrative leading to this moment is Jiaozi’s creation which deviates significantly from prior versions of Nezha’s story. However, despite their differences, the broader arc of his character remains similar. The “cutting” scene in both the 1979 and 2025 films give Nezha agency in this pivotal part of the story, where the rebel takes responsibility for his actions and pays the ultimate price. By doing so, the protagonist breaks free from the chains holding him back and returns in a fully self-actualised form. In Jiaozi’s film, Nezha’s body is literally remade amidst the purifying flames of True Samādhi Fire or 三昧真火.
Ian Tee, 爹爹，我把骨肉还给您 (detail), 2023. Installation view of panels depicting the Dragon King Ao Guang, exhibited in The Unfaithful Octopus (2023) at NTU ADM Gallery, Singapore. Image courtesy of the artist and NTU ADM Gallery.
For audiences who grew up with some familiarity of Nezha’s character, Ne Zha 2 is an imaginative retelling of an iconic story. Though updated with contemporary 3D animation techniques, there is a continuity in the spirit of what Nezha represents in the Chinese consciousness. Following this line of thinking, the narrative and stylistic shifts in each adaptation of Nezha’s story can also be interpreted through the lens of its sociopolitical context.
Released in 1979, after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the revolutionary imagery in Nezha Conquers the Dragon King is unmistakeable. Nezha can be interpreted as the young revolutionary figure who was betrayed by his elders, and parallels can be made between the oppressive Four Dragon Kings and the “Gang of Four”, a Maoist political faction, who came to power during the Cultural Revolution. In Ne Zha 2, Nezha and his allies challenge a world order shaped by the hegemonic Chan sect of immortals. Patterns of imperialist extraction and subjugation in the film’s universe can be found in ours as well.
Despite being two separated adaptations based on a shared source material, Nezha Conquers the Dragon King and Jiaozi’s version both received critical acclaim at home and internationally, striking a chord with audiences through their narrative and aesthetic propositions. The 1979 version modernised traditional opera with fluidity and distortions available in the medium of hand-drawn animation. Ne Zha 2 similarly taps into the world-building capability in computer graphics, folding in strategies from video games and tropes in Stephen Chow’s action-comedy films.
Ian Tee, 爹爹，我把骨肉还给您 (detail), 2023. Installation view of artwork title translated into Thai, and presented as a wall graphic in The Unfaithful Octopus (2024) at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum. Photo by Phuping Tankasem.
In the ending of Ne Zha 2, the Dragon King Ao Guang asks Nezha if he thinks he can change the world. Nezha defiantly replies: “I want to try.” Young people can see themselves in Nezha’s spirit, with the desire and will to push against the status quo, against injustice. Storytellers project their aspirations and reflect their social realities in his story. People are perhaps drawn to the character because in every era, there is a need for a rebel figure. Yet I wonder if we can also find the strength to pay the same price that he did. What do we need to sacrifice or “cut” off today to go out in that blaze of glory?