Shhan
How many forms can we imagine for a single being?
Shhan expands the colossal black cat from The SHHAN into an independent presence. Moving beyond its role in the comic and the events of its story, the project freely varies its scale, form, bodily boundaries and atmosphere to explore the many appearances and kinds of presence a single black cat can embody.
Shhan began as a spin-off from The SHHAN, prompted by the desire to draw its colossal black cat more freely.
In the comic, Shhan appears within the long history of the White Cats and Black Cats: a gigantic Black Cat that inflicted devastating harm on the White Cats, becoming a named presence within the two species’ conflict and memory. The story, however, centres less on Shhan’s appearance than on the events it set in motion and the history surrounding them.
SHHAN was drawn to the colossal black cat as a being in its own right. Rather than continuing those events, he brought Shhan outside the story, seeking to render it as a beautiful form—larger, freer, and at times transformed almost beyond the resemblance of a living creature.
The visual experiments of Multiverse, made around the same period, also informed this process. Irregular lines that flow and twist like liquid, dissolving the boundary between body and surrounding space, recur in Shhan. Where such distortions in Multiverse express beings passing through different dimensions and space-times, here they focus on a single colossal black cat.
No fixed set of rules governs Shhan’s appearance. The basic form of a black cat remains, but the body’s scale, density and outline, along with its surrounding space, vary freely from work to work.
In Longing, golden currents rise across the black cat’s body. In Devil or Angel, a halo and immense white wings accompany the dark figure, bringing together the sacred and the ominous. In One Spring Day, most of the body appears as a pale, hazy substance, softening the boundary between the cat and its surroundings.
In Departure and Arrival, an immense body rises or appears before a small human figure, suggesting a being leaving somewhere and arriving again. Rather than tracing a specific journey, these images revisit through Shhan the sense of movement and transformation first explored in Multiverse.
In The Colossal Being, this interest becomes especially clear through scale itself. The black cat dominating the image and the tiny human standing before it reverse a familiar relationship of size. The human no longer looks down at a cat, but stands as a small presence before a creature whose magnitude exceeds any bodily point of reference.
Yet enormity in Shhan does not necessarily mean terror or destruction. Shhan does not act like a conventional monster demolishing cities or attacking people. It stands still, looks into the distance, or displays an indifference much like that of an ordinary cat.
The familiar manner of a small animal coexists with overwhelming scale, bringing intimidation and stillness, familiarity and strangeness into the same image. For SHHAN, this was more than drawing an enlarged cat: it was the discovery that changing a being’s size alone could alter the position and perceptions of the human looking at it.
This interest continued in Kaiju Encyclopedia in 2022 and in later works exploring the scale of enormous cats and small humans, cities and living beings. Shhan is an early project in which colossal presences and reversals of scale, recurring concerns in SHHAN’s later work, began to emerge fully.
The project also brings elements of earlier work together in a new direction. From The SHHAN comes the being named Shhan; from Multiverse comes a visual language of bodies and spaces flowing into new forms. Together, they allow a character from a story to become an independent presence that can be imagined beyond the comic’s established world.
In The SHHAN, Shhan was a being with a role in a story. In Shhan, the being itself becomes the subject of the work.
How many forms can we imagine for a single being?
By freely transforming the figure of a colossal black cat, Shhan expands the possibilities of its scale and form, feeling and atmosphere—and its beauty.