“Digital Reincarnations”

by Xin Wang & Lu Yang

The practice of Shanghai-based artist Lu Yang is best characterized as a continuous project of world-building. His videos, computer games, and digital avatars combine a distinctive repertoire of intellectual traditions and cultural references: Buddhist and Hindu cosmology (as touched on in the 2015 video Moving Gods, exhibited in the China Pavilion at that year’s Venice Biennale), anime and gaming subcultures, neuroscience, and bio-technology. The artist combined these subjects into a delirious multi-chapter video game The Great Adventure of Material World, which featured in the 2018 Shanghai Biennial as part of a massive installation resembling an arcade hall. In the game, players control the Material World Knight through realms such as Hell, Paradise, Space Journey, and Fight with the Self. Among the characters from the artist’s earlier works to make a cameo was Uterus Man—an androgynous character with superpowers tied to the female reproductive system, who first appeared in a 2013 video—and the eponymous protagonist of Wrathful King Kong Core (2011), a Tibetan Buddhist deity whose fearful expressions draw on religion and neurology. Lu’s work is at its most radical when it addresses fundamental issues: life, death, and the (un)knowability of the self.

Lu Yang, Gong Tau Kite, 2016. Still from video, 03:24 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist.

In Lu’s new project DOKU (2020–ongoing), the artist takes advantage of the latest 3D-scanning, motion capture, and digital modeling technologies to create a non-binary digital avatar that places the artist’s facial features on a lean, conventionally masculine body. As a digital being and the artist’s alter ego, DOKU functions as an experimental site for collaborations. Sporting neon tattoos resembling electrical circuits created by the Japanese artist Taku Oshima, it performs in the British band The 1975’s music video “Playing on my Mind,” or modeling for the popular Chinese fashion brand Li Ning. In this interview, the artist delves into his evolving perspectives on life and death, virtuality and corporeality, machine and perception, as well as the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic on digital art, being, and afterlife...READ MORE

Cover Image: Lu Yang, The Great Adventure of Material World, 2019. Still from video game. Image courtesy of the artist.