Mandarin Duck Spring Feast: The Aphrodisiac Banquet

★Adult Comic
　　A cross-disciplinary creation spanning literature and comics, revealing Taiwan's most taboo desires!
　　Food and sex, sexuality and power,
　　We are each other's aphrodisiacs.

　　Based on the novel "The Aphrodisiac Feast" by author Li Ang (already licensed for French translation), this cross-disciplinary collaboration with Hong Kong cartoonist Liu Guangcheng reinterprets the story in comic form. It perfectly presents the rich erotic symbolism, food imagery, and profound discussions of gender and power through visual artistic language.

　　Li Ang once said in an interview: Eating is an instinctive behavior. I love meat, ingredients, and cooking. I hope to write a complete and coherent novel with this theme and this pleasure. Fine cuisine is often linked to sex and love, but I also want to incorporate political and cultural aspects, and revolve around a female character, from birth to death, to delineate a portrait of an era.

　　French media commented on the novel: This book can also be seen as a series of landscapes and portraits. Or how a dish, an ingredient, tells a certain aspect of Taiwanese history, interrogates its diverse identity, explores its mixed culture, and reveals all its symbolic and political dimensions.

　　Author Tsai Su-fen said: "Li Ang has expanded food writing to include the imagination of political, cultural, and social interrelationships, opening up new frontiers in writing and providing readers with a feast of literary culinary marvels."

　　★"The Aphrodisiac Feast" explores the relationship between obedience and power

　　The comic adapts two chapters from the original work, "Beef Noodles" and "Aphrodisiac Feast," as its main axis, using "eating" as a symbol throughout the entire book—
　　What is eaten is not just food, but also history, power, and the body.
　　From the prison cells of the White Terror to the banquet tables of power, a bowl of beef noodles and a table of aphrodisiacs become a mirror of Taiwanese history and human desire.
　　"Beef Noodles" is set in a prison during the White Terror era, where a bowl of beef noodles becomes a symbol of life and death, belief and betrayal; "Aphrodisiac Feast" then shifts to the banquet world after release from prison, from tonic aphrodisiacs to the intercourse of power, revealing how human desire devours ideals.

　　This is not just a challenging work of erotica and politics, but also a cross-disciplinary dialogue between literature and comics, turning viewing into reading, and reading into contemplation.

　　【Synopsis】
　　Beef noodles, aphrodisiacs to 3P scenes—how do the original author and cartoonist create new sparks?

　　A bowl of beef noodles not only subtly depicts the cruel reality of the White Terror era but also reflects the gap between various imaginations and realities of the mainland, isolated by politics. Just as in prison, one wanted to order a bowl of "Taiwanese beef noodles" for a political prisoner on death row, but the beef noodles never arrived, and the inmate was taken out to be executed at dawn. The hope of finding comfort through food also became an irreversible regret...

　　In this graphic novel that challenges boundaries of scale and consciousness, the comic also depicts a man who lost his freedom and bodily autonomy due to political persecution. After being released from prison, he faces not only social alienation and psychological trauma but also the body's forgetfulness and resistance.

　　Can sexual desire—that energy once humiliated and suppressed—still return? The protagonist regains his former virility through various restorative foods.

　　The mysterious and magical "Aphrodisiac Feast" from the East, with its ingredients visually depicted, is vividly portrayed. Seeing and knowing what the ingredients are, can one concoct an aphrodisiac feast oneself? The aphrodisiac, capable of nourishing yin and strengthening yang, aims to eliminate the regret of insufficient sex and love.

　　What they eat are still the reproductive organs of their own gender, other male animals. Do they, by eating penises and testicles, also eat themselves? But if they eat it and it disappears, what then? Perhaps at least it will be safe. At least there's no need to worry about it being too soft, too fast, too small, too short, too thin, too too too... that eternal curse, the origin of all aphrodisiacs.

　　And the female characters are not moral symbols or saviors, but rather practitioners of subjective desire. In sex, they can choose, refuse, and dominate, demonstrating control over their own desires and relationships.

　　Could they be each other's "aphrodisiacs," to be seen and to be eaten? They suck and bite each other's similar organs, could it be, just like men eating "penises," also eating themselves? They truly can be each other's "aphrodisiacs." Then in a 3P, it doesn't have to be just that man, the only person with a penis in the 3P... as long as they are willing and enjoy it, they can also enter each other, their similar organs, knowing and being able to hit the vital points...

　　★Appetizer〈Delicacies from Land and Sea｜Les délices terre mer〉

　　The story opens with the philosophy of "eating" – the ancient belief of "eating to replenish what is lacking" runs through the entire piece: what you eat, what you replenish.
　　From pangolins, civets, snakes, monkeys, sea cucumbers to tiger penises and deer penises, the desire and violence of "eating" coexist.
　　Eating is both the continuation of life and the desire for reproduction.
　　This cruel yet magnificent feast unveils the prelude to "aphrodisiacs" – where food incites desire, and desire alludes to power.

　　★Main Course 1〈Beef Noodles｜Les nouilles au bœuf〉

　　The setting shifts to a prison during the White Terror era.
　　Amidst fear and hunger, political prisoners find their only solace in "beef noodles."
　　A bowl of noodles becomes the boundary between life and death—
　　Some shouted "Long live the Communist Party" or "Long live the people of Taiwan" before execution,
　　Some died without eating that bowl of noodles, becoming an eternal regret in the hearts of their cellmates.
　　This bowl of beef noodles is both a symbol of "crime and punishment" and an allegory of "assimilation"—
　　Behind the noodles and spice lies the political strategy of the regime to infiltrate memory through food.

　　★Main Course 2〈Aphrodisiac Feast｜Gourmandises aphrodisiaques〉

　　Thirty years later, the political veteran who emerged from prison becomes an honored guest among social elites.
　　Amidst banquets, he seeks the secret to regaining youth—from duck embryos and chicken testicles to seal penises and tiger penis wine, men discuss "tonifying the kidneys" and "regaining virility," while women exchange "food and sex" for power and youth.

　　★Main Course 3〈A Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix│Banquet d’État〉

　　In "A Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix," a dish symbolizing the pinnacle of sexual love, the metaphors of body, politics, and history are pushed to the extreme.
　　He ultimately falls into an absurd 3P scene, his body and desires out of control, and at the moment of climax, he recalls the bowl of beef noodles never delivered in prison—
　　"Seize the moment" becomes the resonance of desire and life.

　　★Dessert〈Seize the Moment｜La Gourmandise et la Luxure〉

　　After the change of regime, the former "democracy fighters" become the new elite.
　　The protagonist visits China, searching for the origin of that "braised beef noodle," but gets lost among countless restaurants and slogans—
　　"Made in China," "Made for Taiwanese," "Made in Taiwan," identity is as confused as taste.
　　Beef noodles become the spell of memory: he finally understands that the bowl of noodles was not a political conspiracy, nor a nostalgic comfort, but an irreparable regret—"I should have ordered that bowl of noodles sooner."
　　The story of food and sex ultimately tastes of "missed opportunities."

　　A feast of food and sex, an allegory of power and desire.
　　From the White Terror to contemporary Taiwan, "The Aphrodisiac Feast" writes about the island's desires and memories in the most naked way.