Zishi Han
FATAL ATTRACTION. INTO THE LIGHT
17. May – 28. June 2026
Overbeck-Gesellschaft

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 streetlamp becomes a masochistic performance — of the human drive toward light, toward illumination, and of the violence inherent in visibility itself.
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

OPENING
Saturday, May 16
2–4 pm, Soft Opening
5 pm, Welcome by Jan Hendrik Pratje, Second Chairman
Introduction by Paula Kommoss, Director

EXHIBITION PROGRAM
4 pm, Performance: HIS BROTHER ECHO
Augustine Paredes, Roman Steinmetz