Zen & Obsession禅与迷

Zen & Obsession is a visual experiment exploring how spiritual emptiness and obsessive attention can co-exist in contemporary culture.
Inspired by Zen Buddhism’s paradoxes — emptiness, immediacy, wordlessness — the project attempts to translate these into a visual and conceptual grammar rooted in media, fandom, and symbolic over-saturation.

In the first phase, I constructed a pseudo-scriptural visual language using repeated imagery and modular layouts. These images were not made to “mean” anything directly. Instead, they function as metaphors for Zen’s pointing without explaining — a ritual of looking, and of getting lost while looking.

In the second phase, I merged the mechanics of fan culture — projection, devotion, repetition — with Zen iconography. Idol figures and sacred scripts became intertwined, creating a symbolic field where secular obsession meets spiritual longing. It questioned what we worship today, and how we locate our identities in the act of consuming.

In the third phase, I designed an interactive publication: part book, part visual puzzle. Readers can rearrange, collage, and reshape the content, producing a different “reading” each time. This format reflects both Zen’s disruption of linear logic and our fragmented way of making meaning today.

In the end, this work doesn’t aim to define Zen or critique fandom.
It simply offers a space to pause.
A moment of mindful confusion.
Because perhaps obsession is not so far from meditation — both begin with a gaze, and both, in different ways, are a search for something beyond words.

《禅与迷》是一个融合视觉叙事、符号建构与文化批评的实验项目。灵感源自禅宗的“空”、“顿悟”与“无言之教”，我尝试将其翻译为一种面向当代视觉消费社会的叙事语言。

第一阶段，我通过图像采样与排版重组，构建了一个类似“经文”系统的符号集合。这些图像并不直接表达意义，而是以间接、留白、重复的方式，模仿禅语的“指月之指”特性，邀请观者参与“观看中的修行”。

第二阶段，我引入粉丝文化中的“精神投射”机制，将偶像图像与禅宗符号交叠处理，生成一种模糊的、既神圣又世俗的“精神符号场”。这种设计方式质疑我们如何在消费中构建信仰，以及在“爱的狂热”中寻找存在感。

第三阶段，我设计了一本互动式出版物，观者可以翻页、拼贴、重新编排内容，每一次阅读都不完全相同。这种非线性、去中心的结构，回应了禅宗对“常规知识逻辑”的破坏，也象征当代人对“意义碎片化”的困惑。

最终呈现并非为了“解释”禅或“还原”粉丝，而是作为一次诚实的观看练习。我希望这部作品能让人停顿片刻，在迷恋的热浪中，感受到一丝清醒的风。禅，不是一种形式，而是一种“观看的方式”；而“迷”，恰恰来自我们渴望意义的那部分心。