Shanghai-born, Tokyo-based artist Lu Yang transforms the Museum of the Transferring Picture into a stunning temple of digital devotion. Guided by an Escher-like checkerboard flooring, guests enter “The Great Adventure of Material World” (2019–20), a hypnotic arcade the place Buddhist cosmology refracts by means of gaming tradition. Screens, projections, and murals overflow with deities, avatars, and cybernetic our bodies, radiating Lu’s delirious, maximalist power. The result’s a world without delay ecstatic and disorienting — a sensory overload that turns spectacle into revelation.
Lu’s universe teems with fragmented our bodies and hybrid avatars — Most cancers Child, Uterus Man, Pelvis Chariot — that destabilize each class of physique, gender, and identification. Suspended between the grotesque and the lovable, these figures’ ornamented skins and fantastical personas evoke Georges Bataille’s concept that extra and transgression can open a path to ecstatic perception past rational order. Right here, Lu multiplies into gods, demons, and monsters, enacting a ritual shedding of self by means of transformation. Utilizing his personal scanned face and physique and turning that into an idol, he turns into each worshipper and worshipped, collapsing the road between reverence and simulation. A determine from his earlier work additionally based mostly on the artist’s digitized physique, “LuYang Delusional Mandala” (2015), returns right here: He sits enthroned on the middle of a radiant halo wired with neurosurgical electrodes — a crown that fuses religious enlightenment with the dopamine rush of the physique itself. This hybrid headpiece melds the sacred and the profane, aligning religious aspiration with technological transcendence. Via such gestures, Lu bridges Buddhist concepts of a fluid, ever-changing self with postmodern notions of subjectivity as one thing one makes with each second of their being.
The beginning display of Lu Yang, “The Great Adventure of Material World” (2019–20)
But Lu’s extra by no means lapses into abstraction — it stays rooted in pop vernacular. Drawing on the affective codes of gaming and subcultures akin to anime, arcade aesthetics, and combating video games, he turns what may look like pure spectacle right into a device for thought. In psychological phrases, it’s a type of desublimation — the place the lofty beliefs of artwork and spirituality are filtered by means of the pleasures of mass tradition. What first seems as floor delight turns into, paradoxically, a meditative act. The absurd, abject, comedian, and cute all turn into unlikely routes to transcendence.
The explanation “The Great Adventure of Material World” is just now debuting in a United States museum greater than 5 years after it was made could lie in cultural and language variations (the work is in Mandarin, with English subtitles). But it’s exactly by means of such devices of play and immersion that these obstacles dissolve. Within the recursive logic of gaming, Lu discovers a common language of transformation, carrying Buddhist perception seamlessly throughout screens and cultures. His latest DOKU sequence, begun throughout lockdowns associated to the COVID-19 pandemic round 2020, is now on view at Amant in Brooklyn and on the China Institute’s Metamorphosis, extending this cycle of reincarnation — a digital soul reborn for the worldwide stage.
Set up view of Lu Yang, The Nice Journey of Materials World
Set up view of Lu Yang, The Nice Journey of Materials World
Somebody taking part in Lu Yang, “The Great Adventure of Material World” (2019–20)
The artist taking part in “The Great Adventure of Material World” (2019–20)
The beginning display of Lu Yang, “The Great Adventure of Material World” (2019–20)
Lu Yang: The Nice Journey of Materials World continues on the Museum of the Transferring Picture (36-01 thirty fifth Avenue, Astoria, Queens) by means of March 22, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Regina Harsanyi.
