06 / 10 September 2021
Park Hub, Via Garofalo 31, Milan
On the occasion of the Milan Design Week 2021, Park Hub reopens its doors to the city hosting THE LUST installation, a project by Chiara Zhu that won the second edition of the Milan Design Week Call promoted by Park Associati.
'Desire is an extremely complex and ambivalent concept. It is an omnipresent feeling that affects our choices and decisions and shapes our personalities. The boundary between desire and need has never been more ephemeral.' Chiara Zhu
THE LUST is a cultural communication project originally created as a magazine to include philosophical investigations, interviews and visual content.
In an almost Disney-like style made of objects, pastel colours and painted matryoshka dolls, which symbolise the individual and are the leitmotif of the exhibition, Chiara Zhu suggests the elusiveness and intrinsic contradiction of the combination of desire and need. Behind a seemingly aesthetic research of the images on display hides a deeper and (self) critical vision of contemporaneity.
'LUST', a Freudian term that denotes sexual desire, plays ironically with our daily cravings. Each image on display is accompanied by a short text that draws its inspiration from key figures of modern philosophy and sociology.
The desire-need loop is thus reflected in the relationship between image and word: the former cannot be fully explained without the latter, and the text draws strength from the direct language of the image. The viewer is invited to approach the work with freedom and, therefore, responsibility.
The project is the result of the Milan Design Week Call #02, launched in 2019 by Park Associati with the aim of opening the practice's spaces to new young voices from the world of design.
Under-30 designers from over 15 countries around the world submitted their applications for a chance to exhibit their work in Park Hub during the Milan Design Week.
Chiara Zhu is a Venetian designer. Among the fields in which she operates, graphic photography and cultural communication are her main interest. Her artistic vision is characterised by a vital and extroverted emphasis on colour colour. Based on the investigation of contemporaneity, thus intrinsically contradictory, her imagination is abstract yet direct and graphically tangible. The visual metaphor is in fact her favourite tool in many of her works, in which philosophical and social reflection is the essential starting point and, hopefully, the end point.