The full title of this picture is "Icebox on the Fishing Boat". It depicts a necessary part of purse selines fishing process. Since fishes are dragged a long way before the catch can be brought in, a lot of them would be pretty mutilated when unloaded. Then they will be kept on ice until the boat docks, unless there is a processing facility onboard.

While the fishes are supposed to be flash-frozen, some non-creditable source said that they are still conscious up to 15 minutes after being thrown into ice.

I got the idea of this picture one day when I was half asleep midnight. Immediately I got up and did a rough-sketch and worked on it for about 10 days. Since I was drawing a fantasy creature, a lot of human anatomy (something that I still have much to learn) were pretty much ignored.

A lot of people told me that their focus of this picture was the couple on the lower-left corner. I tried to work quite a few different ideas into this picture (like freezing to death, mental shocking, pregnancy etc.). This is one of them. And just one of them in my view. Actually my favourite is the arm-breaking on the upper-left. It shows the difference of the physical strength between these mermaids and their captor, supposely human.

One person asked why are their hair braided/tied (which I did not answered at that time). I wanted this to hint subtly that these are somewhat sentient/civilized creatures, not just some meat-lump that happens to have a human face.

It still remains one of my favourite picture ever since.

In fact, most of my guro work ideas were sprung up when I was half asleep. I suspect some sort of guro-fairy was to be blamed. (?!)