Faculty of Art

Criticism and Curatorial Practice

Shanwei Fu

Puzzle: A Residential Design for Sartre

A solo exhibition for designer&artist Qing (Zoey) Sheng.

“ “Hell is other people” is a famous phrase by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his play No Exit (1944). It depicts the complex relationship between the self and others, which is both dependent and conflicting.  Starting from this phrase, the artist Zoey Sheng imagines that Sartre is living in the contemporary; Sheng brings existentialism into architecture studies and develops a residential design project specifically for Sartre. In this project, Sheng studies history and tradition of philosophy and architecture, and reviews personal life of Sartre and Beauvoir. She utilizes the burr puzzle as a key analogy of the relationship between the self and others, analyzes the puzzle structure and reconstructs it as the design prototype.  The exhibition embraces the entire project, consisting of mind maps, history studies, AutoCAD drawing, digital modelling, interior rendering, and the physical model. For Sheng, the project is not only a process of designing and learning Sartre and existentialism, but also a dialogue between the designer and dweller, a research on the relationship between architecture and thinking, and a power negotiation in living space.  Sheng hopes to use the exhibition as a broader practice space, and hopes audiences could echo to explore the relationship with others and the universal.”