Lu Yang’s digital reincarnations explore a world beyond gender and reality

This uncanny instability is at once bracing and unsettling. “You can do everything in the virtual space, but you may also do nothing,” they tell me. To Lu, the appeal of the virtual is its capacity not only for endless self-reinvention, but for transcending normative ideas of the self entirely. To “do nothing” is not a sign of failure. In fact, nothingness is the goal. As Lu puts it, “in the world behind the screen, I feel a sense of abandoning gender, identity, age, nationality and all social labels, hoping to create a state in which human beings just think about life and other people don’t care what you are.”

The seeds of Lu’s current artistic practice were planted early. Their grandmother, a Buddhist, sparked a longstanding interest in the religion, whose iconography litters their work. A childhood fascination with anime and video games informs their dense, colourful aesthetic, which references everything from Dance Dance Revolution to Neon Genesis Evangelion.

With The Great Adventure, which was developed using the cross-platform game engine Unity 3D, Lu was drawn to the medium’s “freedom compared with showing a fixed image". “From the viewer’s perspective, it’s like ascending to another dimension to explore the world of the creator,” they explain. But Lu remains non-prescriptive: “In recent years, I have been making pieces using game engines, and I may also use other tools in the future. I don’t even think my work is art. I prefer to say I’m just a human being who likes to create works freely.”

Lu’s blasé attitude to art feels disarming, even blasphemous. “I actually don’t like contemporary art; I’m not really interested in it,” they tell me. But as someone who grew up on the same diet of anime and video games as Lu, it’s exciting to see them playing the art establishment by their own rules, full otaku self still intact. If artists like Peggy Ahwesh and Phil Solomon applied the logic of contemporary art to video games with works like She Puppet and Rehearsals for Retirement, Lu returns the favour, pushing the cacophonous, over-the-top stylings of contemporary video games into the art world.

Just as Lu’s work defies the logic of the contemporary art world, it exists outside of social regimes of gender, or of nationality. They are frequently asked in interviews if they view themselves as a “Chinese artist”, and each time they bat the question away in frustration. When I bring up Dawn Chan’s influential essay on Asia-Futurism, which referenced Lu as part of a tradition of Asian artists critically imagining the future, they told me it was the first they’d heard of it. “China, the future, technology, AI — we already have too many labels,” they say. “I hope what I do and what I find interesting can go beyond labels like these.”

If there is any unifying philosophy within Lu’s art, it is their persistent preoccupation with Buddhist concepts surrounding impermanence and death. When we discuss the idea of the self, for example, Lu references the Buddhist tradition of visualising one’s own decay and death, which they often externalise in their work. “Maybe I use this method to try and reach a kind of goal of abandoning the self, even though it is quite hard to do so,” they tell me. “Many of my works touch on concepts of 成住坏空,” Lu explains, using a Chinese term expressing the Buddhist idea that all things will “arise, abide, change and disappear.” In other words, “all things are in flux.”

When Lu is reborn as Doku, then, this comes with a recognition that “even rebirth is just a temporary state” (they even flatly say that “I don’t want to be reborn”.) When they constantly move from medium to medium, interest to interest, this isn’t borne out of a conscious striving for innovation, but of a simple desire to yield to that feeling of flux. In a year of new challenges and new projects, including a place in the Asia Society’s inaugural Triennial, we can’t wait to see where this flux takes them.