The Oxygen Thief series recounts the poor decision making of an unreliable narrator who indulges in emotionally manipulating women. In his inactive pursuit to change, he falls in ‘love’ and intends to commodify it, relying on self-pity and narcissism to do so, using self-awareness as an excuse.

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The design was based on cannibalistic love. The physical act of consuming someone is comparable to the emotional consumption that love has; the intensity of love being redirected from the image of pure innocence into an overwhelmingly grotesque negativity.

There are intense psychological effects from both love and cannibalism, the link here being drawn in self-preservation. This is how the narrator hurts women around him—by means of false self-preservation, reliant on self-sabotage and dangerous fixations towards others. It’s done subconsciously to isolate and protect oneselves from external complications. In this comparison the narrator is a willing and self-aware cannibal.

The physical depiction of cannibalistic love is done by weaving paper together, showing the forced combination of people. It’s completed in the shape of an anatomical heart, getting tighter in weaving over the three books to show the further complications of intertwining lives with someone else. The heart shows a physical and direct representation of love, as well as eaten body parts.

The splatters of black paint progressively lessen as the book series continues but it is replaced with brown splatters. The black splatters are used to symbolize the narrator and the brown ones are the women around him; as he lessens his presence and his downfalls catch up to him, the women in his life are able to work together to lessen his impact and push for their own.

photography by Dominic Liongson