In 2005, Cai exhibited a series of work for the exhibition Cai Guo-qiang: Life Beneath the Shadow at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. Inspired by the rich heritage of spiritualism and ghosts in that Scottish city, he produced thirteen portraits of authors, occultists, seers, both real and legendary, and others, derived from folklore and tales (1). From this series, Life Beneath the Shadow: Robert Kirk (Lot 476) describes Cai's imagination of a visual persona of the English philosopher Robert Kirk, who introduced the term "zombie" - a hypothetical being that is of human, but has no conscious experience - and helped popularize the concept in the 1970s. Rather than offering a traditional portrait, Cai illustrates a group of shadowy figures roaming across the horizon of a scene, as a tall tree looms in the foreground, to both evoke the imagery of zombies and represent the persona of Robert Kirk all at once. Not only does the work demonstrates Cai's rich visual vocabulary and his ability to achieve with his innovative gunpowder medium, it also potently illustrate Cai's unbounded imaginative capabilities as an artist as animated by mythology and supernatural.

(1)Micelle Yun, From Guggenheim Museum Publications, Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Cai Guo-qiang - I Want To Believe, New York, US, p. 122.