Zishi Han
Fatal Attraction (ENG)
2026

A moth moves toward illumination as if toward revelation. Instead, this being enters a system that records, preserves, and eventually extinguishes it. Its attraction to light has long been considered instinctive, yet within the structures that surround it-field observation, archival documentation, laboratory experiment-it becomes something else: a methodology for gathering bodies, organizing movement, and producing knowledge. Light does not simply illuminate the insect. It exposes it to capture, measurement, and control. What appears at first as fascination is, in many cases, fatal.
Between garden, archive, and laboratory, this exhibition of works by Chinese artist Zishi Han traces a continuum of surveillance in which life becomes increasingly legible-and increasingly vulnerable. The moth’s fatal attraction to light becomes a stand-in for other forms of attraction: to visibility, to recognition, to desire.
Like the moth, these forces offer the promise of orientation. Like the moth, the may also lead toward disappearance. The nocturnal flights of stillness unfolds through this apparatus of attraction. In scenes between Lübeck, Hamburg, and Konstanz, a new film follows the figure of moths as it passes through different environments of observation. In the garden of the Overbeck-Gesellschaft - Kunstverein Lübeck, the insects are alive, circling freely around a UV lamp in darkness. In the archives of a research institute in Hamburg, they appear as preserved specimens-secured, classified, and photographed through the repeated flash of scientific documentation. In laboratories in Konstanz, the moth becomes part f sensory perception are isolated and measured through electrodes and projected visual patterns Across these sites, the insect exists in multiples states: alive, immobilized, preserved. The same attraction that draws the moth to light also produces the conditions through which it becomes legible. At the center of the exhibition is the moth itself-a reature irresistibly drawn toward illumination but unable to escape it. Across Han’s practice, this movement becomes a metaphor for human impulses: the yearning of visibility, the pleasure of looking, the desire to be recognized within systems that simultaneously expose and confine us.
FATAL ATTRACTION is a dense spatial installation combining video, sculpture, and sound in which nocturnal observations from Lübeck’s green spaces unfold alongside fragments of scientific imagery and staged encounters. The exhibition becomes a shifting field of perception in which bodies-human and insects alike-circulate through regimes of visibility.
Light here is not merely illumination. It functions as a social, political, and erotic force: an apparatus that gathers bodies and distributes attention. What promises orientation also become a trap.
Like the moth circling the flame, these forces promise recognition even as they hold the conditions of erasure. In turning toward what reveals us, we risk entering the very same system of classification and control.

This booklet is published on the occasion of the exhibition
ZISHI HAN
FATAL ATTRACTION
May 17 - June 28, 2026
Texts: Paula Kommoss
Editors: Jess Clifford and Anne Levke Vorbeck
Copyediting: Talia Walther
Graphic Design: Marius Schwarz