The Lust

About

The Lust – do you need it or do you want it?

‘Desire is an extremely complex and ambivalent concept, you can find it in any human,

cultural, anthropological field. It is a current and ubiquitous term, we employ it in

order to cope with our daily life as well as to define our identity/es as persons but also as

consumers, prosumers. Especially in nowadays the borderline between our desires and

needs have become more and more ambiguous than even before...’

The exhibition is based on a 6-month research developed in 2016 through the main tool of photography and art direction with the final result of magazine “The Lust”. The research visualises complex and philosophical content through visual metaphors, with the willingness of combining design with other fields of knowledge such as sociology and psychology. The magazine takes concreteness in visualising real couples of need/desire in different domains with an attention to some of the recent and current phenomena of society and politics such as the law on Stepchild adoption, the science of motivation, consumerism, the multiple identity of the self, social media, immigration.

The matrioska is brought to a universal symbol for the self and the individual who is alone and has to faces needs and desires according to the ethic of consumerism, social media and politics. Therefore, the Matrioska is employed as the file-rouge for the entire work and exhibition and wants to captivate the observer’s attention through a contemporary and colourful style which is achieved through pastel colours and objects of the everyday-life.

The overall result is a a-temporal dimension where colours and lights become protagonists like statues fixed in time, slaves of our times and our beliefs. What is shared is a silent figure that pukes a bill, a fetus between two homosexual cards, a family captured in a bird cage, and a übermensch (super-man) in an upside-down globe.

The metaphor therefore is the primary tool of communication, through simple objects and symbols the observer is invited to dive in an a-temporal dimension of the self and to immerse him/herself into the apparent beauty of colours that hide deeper meanings. 

Chiara Zhu (in art, ColorChiara) is a brand graphic designer and artist currently based in London. Her works engage with political and social issues blending conceptual abstraction and visual metaphorical languages of minimal and intuitive expressions. She is currently finishing a Master of Arts in Brands, Communication and Culture within the Media and Communication department at Goldsmiths University of London.

colorchiara.com /  @colorchiara