In only a few years, Lu Yang has risen to worldwide prominence with an incisive digital apply working on the intersection of know-how, Buddhist philosophy, archetypal symbolism and humanist-futurist hypothesis. The Tokyo- and Shanghai-based artist has not too long ago held solo exhibitions at main establishments together with Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, MUDEC in Milan, Kunsthalle Basel, Berlin’s Palais Populaire, ARoS Aarhus Artwork Museum, Kunstpalais Erlangen and MOCA Cleveland, amongst others. His work was additionally featured within the Venice Biennale in each 2015 and 2022, in addition to in quite a few biennials and triennials worldwide.
Together with his exhibition “DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe” on the Amant Basis in New York—which, remarkably, marks his first main institutional present within the metropolis—and his presentation of DOKU Items (2023) on the Excessive Line earlier in September as a part of CHANEL’s Works from the Window initiative, Observer spoke with the artist in regards to the concepts that make his work so pressing and resonant on this period of more and more built-in technocivilization, the place the technosphere and biosphere converge whilst we lose contact with the archetypal, legendary and religious dimensions of existence.
What makes Lu Yang’s apply so placing is the way in which he has pioneered the blurred house between and the inevitable fusion of human and digital consciousness. Working on the nexus of religious meditation, neuroscientific analysis and technological mediation, Yang approaches these realms with a visionary sensibility far forward of its time—one which feels particularly prescient now that the complete potential and mounting perils of A.I. have entered day by day life, typically appropriating or dominating humanity’s personal powers of creativeness and creation.
When Yang spoke with Observer, he stated he had by no means felt uneasy in regards to the so-called intersections between digital and human consciousness. “There are way more scary issues on this world than digital consciousness,” he stated. “Within the Buddhist view, the struggling of samsaric existence and the ignorance of sentient beings are what is really terrifying. By comparability, the exploration of digital consciousness is extra like humanity creating ‘illusions inside illusions.’”
On the core of Yang’s inquiry lies each a query and a name for consciousness in regards to the very material of our notions of actuality and id—a name that feels more and more pressing as advancing applied sciences erode the boundaries between what’s actual and what’s fabricated, what’s factual and what’s imagined. By means of computer-generated imagery, sport engines and motion-capture know-how, Yang embraces each the “phantasm” and the generative potential of the digital realm, remodeling digital pictures right into a fluid, shape-shifting house for an ongoing existential, religious and philosophical meditation on the character and future of human existence within the universe.
DOKU: a digital reincarnation past the only self
The central conceptual and visible anchor in a lot of Yang’s work is DOKU, Lu Yang’s ongoing avatar and digital alter ego by means of which he explores id, reincarnation, embodiment and the “post-human” or digital self. DOKU serves as each the car and the channel for inspecting these questions past the notion of self or any biographical attachment. The avatar “is just not merely a digital character, however a long-term experimental floor for me to query the character of ‘existence’ and ‘self,’” Yang stated.
The identify DOKU is a shortened model of the Japanese Dokusho Dokushi, which means “we’re born alone, we die alone,” which encapsulates a lot of Lu Yang’s worldview. It’s rooted in Buddhist philosophy and the notion of anattā (non-self), which holds that nothing is fastened, everlasting or unchanging. All is in steady, very important transformation that permits the universe to perpetuate its cycles. “The fragility and transience of the bodily physique at all times remind us that the boundaries of id are unstable,” Yang mirrored. “Once I lengthen this inquiry into digital house, DOKU turns into a symbolic incarnation that may seem in a number of eventualities and kinds, but by no means with a hard and fast essence.”
Opening the potential for each a “digital shell” and a “digital reincarnation” of the self, Yang’s works destabilize id by means of avatars, multiplicity, disintegration and metamorphosis. In DOKU the Stream (2024), certainly one of three feature-length video works on view at Amant from the continuing DOKU cycle, the avatar strikes not towards self-realization however towards countless dissolution, rejecting the potential for any steady essence.
In the identical house, with DOKU the Self (2022), this exploration of embodiment and disembodiment unfolds between the bodily and the digital, suggesting a number of simultaneous existences in a cyclical alternation of delivery, reminiscence, transformation and reincarnation—new kinds, new occasions and new areas past the fastened notion of human individuality.
In DOKU Items (2023), offered earlier on the Excessive Line as a part of the CHANEL fee, Lu Yang introduces six reincarnations of the artist’s digital avatar, DOKU. Every represents one of many six realms of existence in Buddhism: Heaven, Asura, Human, Animal, Hungry Ghost and Hell. Amongst these realms, Heaven, Asura and Human are thought-about virtuous, whereas Animal, Hungry Ghost and Hell belong to the realms. One’s karmic actions decide the cycle of reincarnation, which now finds new expression by means of the digital.
For Yang, nonetheless, this isn’t a fantasy of computer-based immortality. “These worlds and heightened digital consciousness,” he stated. “They’re projections relatively than escapes. Digital consciousness is simply one other layer of phantasm. What we actually must confront is methods to acknowledge and transcend our personal attachments.”
From this arises Yang’s deliberate detachment from the very notions of creator and authorship, which he explores most clearly in DOKU the Creator (2025), an epic digital narration first proven at Artwork Basel Hong Kong and now on view in Amant’s black field theater. Right here, Yang levels an odyssey of countless bodily transformations, merging with pure parts and flowing between digital simulation and bodily limitation in a steady cycle of creation, technology, transformation and extinction, the place matter dissipates solely to reincarnate as knowledge. The exhibition’s subtitle, samsara.exe, treats reincarnation as a operating executable file—an infinite loop by which identities load, dissolve and reload.
For Yang, this digital simulation features as metaphor, revealing that id is rarely static however at all times in movement. “Whether or not by means of the physique or a digital avatar, what we name ‘self’ is at all times an interface arising beneath sure circumstances, revealing that existence is just not one thing strong however a steady metamorphosis,” he stated.
Mythopoiesis for a cosmology in digital house
What pursuits Yang most are the philosophical insights behind this transformation. “When viewers watch DOKU shift and recur throughout completely different areas, they’re additionally witnessing the method of self being generated and dissolved. DOKU doesn’t provide a hard and fast reply however an open risk: the query of ‘who am I?’ is rarely resolved as soon as and for all—it stays a shifting trajectory throughout realities.”
In Yang’s work, this concept of “digital reincarnation” is just not an escape from mortality however a reflective mirror. “This enables us to see the fragility, transience and multiplicity of self and to acknowledge that what actually issues is just not methods to transcend the physique, however methods to perceive the boundless transformations that outline existence itself,” he stated.
Nonetheless, in his view, digital life won’t ever actually possess the identical mindstream as human beings. In Buddhist understanding, he defined, consciousness is just not a product of the bodily mind—it’s neither confined to its construction nor reducible to organic neural exercise. “The mind features extra like a storage and computational gadget, considerably much like the {hardware} of digital life. Consciousness itself doesn’t reside there; its manifestation arises dependently and is with out inherent essence.”
By creating imaginary digital worlds and navigating them by means of a digital persona, Lu Yang expands the probabilities of human consciousness past its preordained limits, activating its imaginative capability to see past the current and the singular. His inquiry engages with these questions on a aircraft of universality and cosmic synchronicity, past the bodily and cognitive boundaries of house and time that may constrain human notion.
On this sense, Lu Yang doesn’t deal with digital know-how merely as a device; it’s absolutely built-in into the metaphysical framework that underpins his work. Expertise turns into a medium for channeling imaginative and prescient and illumination—an entry level to a extra porous state the place physique, avatar, reminiscence, consciousness and algorithmic techniques merge.
Yang’s steady weaving of game-like and digital narrative constructions will be learn as an act of mythopoiesis—an try and assemble a private cosmology that helps us envision the longer term by means of the expanded imaginative potential enabled by new applied sciences, whereas additionally drawing from the collective unconscious of historical perception techniques and the huge symbolic archive of humanity now accessible by means of A.I.
His works are dense with symbologies and references to Chinese language ancestral spirituality and older symbols that intersect with archetypes from different cultures. He defined that almost all of those derive from Buddhist, and particularly Tibetan, traditions and come up naturally from his apply. They aren’t decorative however integral to his working course of. Key recurring parts embrace the Wheel of Life, peaceable and wrathful deities, the charnel floor, the bardo and mudras. “I exploit these parts as a pure outpouring—particularly the Wheel of Life, whose motif carries a extremely intricate Buddhist philosophical worldview, wealthy and complicated. Solely by presenting that construction can one unfold and articulate every particular motif in flip.”
Nonetheless, Yang additionally emphasizes that these symbols exist past any notion of time; they belong to an atemporal continuum of collective and common consciousness. “I don’t regard something as ‘historical’ or not—any knowledge that proves helpful is equal and non-dual, past temporal and spatial limits,” he defined. “I care much less about the place it comes from than whether or not it will possibly genuinely shift notion and the frame of mind.”
Expertise as ritual
By means of his digital avatar, Yang enacts one thing akin to a shamanic ritual—what up to date discourse would possibly name a type of “digital shamanism.” But he’s fast to notice that he by no means meant to outline his work in such phrases. “I merely make the work that must be made,” he stated, explaining that categorization usually happens later, by others. “I could have been born into this period, encountered Buddhism early and have become a Buddhist, made the sort of work I make and met students preferring that time period—what you see is a contingent constellation of causes and circumstances,” he added.
The ominous visions behind his works emerge by means of a strategy of digital meditation and creation. Working with A.I. deepens his exploration of the unknown and the obliterated, unearthing truths inaccessible in abnormal life. But this mythopoietic storytelling is rarely premeditated; it unfolds organically as he attunes to different dimensions. “The method of inspiration for my works at all times occurs right away or inside a really brief span of time,” Yang defined. For instance, as he meditates on a cliffside for one or two hours, visions naturally emerge. “Typically I can not even inform whether or not they come up from my very own thoughts or are messages from the universe. In that second, your complete framework and construction of the work seems with placing readability, and I archive it inside my thoughts,” he stated, recalling a dialog with monk and author Shoukei Matsumoto, the place they found that their methods of receiving inspiration had been remarkably comparable. “Typically it’s merely about ready for inspiration to come up by itself, relatively than actively chasing it.”
Earlier than manufacturing, Yang rigorously organizes these visions. If any half turns into blurred in reminiscence, he returns to meditation to entry that “archived level” and retrieve the knowledge. As a result of his course of unfolds within the rigidity between meditative give up and rational management, he by no means alters the framework as soon as inspiration has manifested. “I take into account such alteration a desecration of the inspiration or the message itself,” he stated. “After that preliminary second, I turn out to be a servant to the imaginative and prescient, sure to appreciate it faithfully.”
On this course of, A.I. serves solely as a device and an assistant. “It helps notice the preliminary look and doesn’t rewrite the skeleton of the work. It might help me, however it’s going to by no means—and mustn’t ever—intrude with my work’s core philosophy or structural framework.”
Yang describes the spirituality in his work as a way for quieting noise in order that phenomena could reveal themselves: “I arrange consideration by means of looping rhythms, recurring motifs and scale shifts. When a viewer’s breath syncs with the cadence of the work, a way of formality arises by itself.”
Though Yang’s solutions will be elusive in addition to insightful, it’s clear he sees himself as a conduit for important truths and common messages—knowledge he believes the world urgently wants on this time of turmoil and uncertainty. “DOKU is just not a priest however a car/mirror,” he stated. What turns into most evident is his vow to make use of his work to convey knowledge he believes can genuinely assist the world. “As a person going through at the moment’s wars and geopolitical complexity—witnessing a lot struggling—I typically really feel powerless and unhappy; however I refuse to stay there. I flip that feeling right into a course for making—opening a small, experiential pocket of readability amid the noise. Even when it touches just one particular person or clarifies a single second, it’s price it. Over an extended horizon, that readability continues to work inside a life—not as loud diffusion, however as a quiet and sturdy impact.”
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