Zishi Han: Fatal Attraction

A moth circles a light. Its flight appears erratic and yet inevitable, as if guided by an invisible law. Between attraction and destruction, orientation and disorientation, unfolds a movement that feels both familiar and mysterious.

Zishi Han takes this nocturnal scene as the starting point for his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, Fatal Attraction, at the Overbeck-Gesellschaft. The exhibition is a sensual yet conceptual exploration of light—as promise and threat, as the engine of desire and an instrument of control.

At its center stands the figure of the moth—a creature irresistibly drawn to light though unable to escape it. Across Han’s practice, the moth is a metaphor for human impulses: the yearning for visibility, the pleasure of looking, the fatal attachment to power. In a dense spatial installation combining video, sculpture, and sound, Han intertwines nocturnal observations from Lübeck’s green spaces with questions of desire, queerness, and diasporic experience. Light here is not just illumination but a social, political, and erotic field—a cage, a sacrament, and a site of self- and other-recognition.

Created specifically for Lübeck, a new film extends Han’s ongoing moths series. In static image compositions, moths and human bodies—queer friends of the artist—encounter each other in a choreographed interplay of exposure and concealment. The camera remains motionless while the images oscillate between delicate observation and hypnotic fixation. Each scene resembles a small stage on which desire and vulnerability, distance and intimacy, are simultaneously negotiated. The fluttering of wings beneath the cold glow of a street light becomes a masochistic performance—of the human drive toward light, toward illumination, and of the violence inherent in visibility itself.

In the exhibition, we encounter the privet hawk moth (Sphinx ligustri), one of the largest and most striking species of nocturnal moth, known to be attracted to ultraviolet light. With a wingspan of up to twelve centimeters, the pattern of its wings—composed of brown, grey, and delicate pink markings—appears both ornamental and functional: during the day it serves as camouflage, while at night it becomes a spectacular visual presence. The species was first described in the mid-eighteenth century by the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), at a time when European naturalists began to formalize systems of scientific classification. In Linnaeus’s work, living beings were organized into hierarchical categories and assigned names. Within this system, each organism became a clearly delineated, legible entity. The moth was thus inscribed into the language of taxonomy. Its identity was fixed within a system designed to render nature comprehensible, predictable, and recognizable. Subjectivity was inseparable from this process of categorization: the moth existed both in and of itself and as a specimen within a human-made hierarchy—a trace of life preserved through classification.

The exhibition also includes a new work from Han’s exuviae series: elongated and cocoon-like metal shells, made of the aluminum chains usually used as insect barriers, are entwined around two horizontally mounted street lamp posts. Low-frequency vibrations cause the chains to tremble, producing a metallic hum reminiscent of the faint beating of wings. In the interplay of sound, light, and movement, an unstable mesh emerges—a space in which the boundaries between body and environment, technology and nature, human and insect begin to blur.

As in previous works, Han is concerned with the conditions of perception: Who sees, who is seen, and at what cost? Light—once a symbol of enlightenment in modernity—here appears ambivalent, both a tool of knowledge and a mechanism of surveillance. The moth, trapped in the beam of the lamp, becomes a symbol of a body unable to escape its gaze.

Fatal Attraction is not only a study of the relationship between light and living beings, but also an allegory of the contemporary gaze—a gaze that seduces as it controls, that fixes as it becomes captive itself. Han’s works unfold a quiet tension between fascination and resistance, between the desire to see and the fear of being seen. They speak of an existence in the in-between—of bodies that are both object and subject of desire, of light that entrances and consumes.

Curated by Paula Kommoss.