Communication Design School of Design
Zixin Zhang
The Name of Love
Installation
Medium: Oil on canvas, Iron desks, Tufting carpets, Pets toys, Sound Dimension: Multiple specification
The purpose of this project space is to express the symbiotic relationship of love and dominance between humans and pets. The core concept of the work is to explore the complex emotions
behind this seemingly gentle control by depicting pets in their state post-neutering surgery. Wrapped in post-surgical garments to prevent them from licking their wounds, the pets are surrounded by brightly colored toys, creating a seemingly lighthearted atmosphere. However, the pets’ unconscious state starkly contrasts with the cold reality, symbolizing their loss of the freedom to choose in a human- dominated world. This gentle control is filled with contradictions, combining affection with a strong desire for dominance. Through this exhibition, I aim to prompt viewers to reconsider the relationship between humans, animals, and nature.
‘Fragments We Still Remember’
‘Fragments We Still Remember’ is an attempt to gather what slips away —
to catch fragments of light, of places, of people, before they vanish into the folds of forgetting.
Rooted in my research on the resurgence of film photography as a conduit for nostalgia and collective memory, this project extends beyond academic reflection. It becomes a personal excavation of memory: not as a fixed narrative, but as a shifting landscape of emotions, textures, and imperfect moments.
Film photography, with its slowness, its flaws, its tactile presence, mirrors the way we remember — unevenly, tenderly, sometimes painfully.
Every grain, every blur, every overexposed frame holds more truth than any polished, edited image could ever offer.
Fragments We Still Remember’ digital and analogue images exist side by side, not in opposition, but in dialogue. They speak of time’s elasticity, of the way memory stretches between the past and the present, sometimes clear, sometimes dissolving at the edges.
This book is not a document of what was, but a quiet reimagining of what remains —
an invitation to linger in the half-light of remembering, where nothing is complete, but everything is alive.
Tracing The Light
This project focuses on sunlight as a central medium, using the theoretical frameworks of phenomenology, emotional geography, and poetic space to explore how light shapes spatial perception and emotional shifts. In the typically overcast winters of the UK, the rarity and brevity of sunlight heightened my sensitivity to its emotional impacts. Through interviews and surveys, I examined how sunlight affects focus, relaxation, and emotional fluctuations. Participants’ emotional experiences were transformed into visual symbols and a language of color to depict diverse emotional states. The project integrates text and painting to document the emotional responses and reflections triggered by sunlight’s flow, while capturing the subtle changes in spatial character brought by light through artistic renderings. Additionally, sunlight’s trajectories and emotional nuances were materialized into three-dimensional installations, using metal mesh and reflective materials to embody the transparency, fluidity, and fleeting nature of light and time. This project seeks to evoke emotional resonance through the language of light, inviting viewers to reexamine the profound connections between space, time, and their inner worlds.
‘If I Became Human…’
This animation presents a fictional yet emotionally resonant interview between myself and an artificial intelligence. Through a voice-based, conversational format, I ask the AI to imagine itself as human—with a body, senses, emotions, and all the irrationalities that come with them. Its responses, unexpectedly poetic and introspective, are drawn from real- time dialogues conducted with ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Using this “dialogue”, I create a short film that reflects AI’s hypothetical inner world—what it imagines human experience to be like, what it envies, what it romanticizes. The animation blends digital logic with human warmth, abstract search patterns with nostalgic imagery, algorithmic structure with emotional ambiguity.