LU Yang

Lu Yang is a multi-media artist based in Shanghai. Mortality, androgyny, hysteria, existentialism and spiritual neurology feed Lu’s jarring and at times morbid fantasies. Also taking inspiration and resources from anime, gaming, and sci-fi subcultures, Lu explores his fantasies through mediums including 3D animation, immersive video game installation, holographic, live performances, virtual reality, and computer programming. Lu has collaborated with scientists, psychologists, performers, designers, experimental composers, pop music producers, robotics labs, and celebrities throughout his practice. Lu has held exhibitions at UCCA, Beijing; M Woods, Beijing; Cc Foundation, Shanghai; Spiral, Tokyo; Fukuoka Museum of Asian Art; Société, Berlin; MOCA Cleveland. Lu has participated in several international biennials and triennials such as Shanghai Biennial 2012 & 2018, Athens Biennale 2018, Liverpool Biennial 2016, International Digital Art Biennale 2016 in Montreal, Chinese Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2015, and Fukuoka Triennial 2014. In 2019, Lu became the 8th BMW Art Journey winner and started the Yang Digital Incarnation project.

The Great Adventure of Material World
The Great Adventure in Material World is the most adventurous video game artwork that Lu Yang has created. The Great Adventure in Material World and Material World Knight have combined all the protagonists in Lu Yang’s artworks from the past and created an alliance of these heroes. In this video game, the world can be indefinitely explored by players. The video game has also incorporated all the elements created in various artworks by Lu Yang in the past. Once a player enters the video game, they will transform into knights in this Material World. As protagonists of the alliance of heroes in the Material World, they will explore the Universe, absorb energy, be destroyed, and achieve rebirth. They will fight all sorts of emotions, desires and eventual themselves.

Cyber Altar
Engaging with ideas of spiritual healing and modern technology, Lu Yang’s works formed a shrine in which the worshipped deities have no material form, but are instead reincarnated as flashy, multicolored moving images. On the two side walls were four LED-lit panels representing deities from her work Electromagnetic Brainology. The five-channel video was installed in the shrine-booth, arranged as an altar, providing a place of worship where visitors could experience trance, transcendence and altered mind states, dazzled by the flashy images and the techno tempo of the videos.
The work takes inspiration from the Buddhist and Hindu conception of the four elements—Earth, Water, Fire and Air―corresponding to the four great pains in the brain’s neurological system. The deities represented by Lu Yang are all armed with modern medical techniques and equipment to suppress and cure the sources of human suffering. The artist’s own image is part of her work, where her body dies, is slowly inserted in a coffin and then loaded in a kitsch, traditional-style Chinese funeral car. Death is represented as a liberation from earthly demons, the end of suffering and the achievement of a higher self-conscience. The artist seems to suggest an awareness and consciousness of our surroundings and our contemporary life is our salvation, our liberation from our blind selves