Sala10: LuYang
virtual exhibition
The Great Adventure of Material World-Game Film
Technogoth Buddhism
LuYang is an artistic category in herself. Refusing any definition of genre, she also tends to reject the description of “artist” in favor of entertainer. In reality, LuYang moves with equal agility in exhibition circuits, among contemporary art collectors or as an influencer or viral figure on social media (especially in Asian societies) and among a younger audience that takes a cybernetic double life as a given. With an original visual, auditory and imaginative intensity, her work combines elements of Indian religions, traditional Chinese medicine and conceptions of the body, global and Chinese pop culture, the narrative models of manga and anime and all kinds of gothic ideas from around the world in order to examine the obsession with immortality, transformation and transcendence as a shared element of religion and digital culture.
LuYang’s work creates a variety of imaginary worlds (presented in videos, installations and public actions) that augment and transfigure the mythologies and personages of Eastern religions into bionic, transcendental beings. These strategies explore existential dramas on both the personal and social levels as well as the struggle of moral forces on an extrasensory plane. In other words, she instrumentalizes the esotericism and culture of the online world through a series of corporeal, religious and social fantasies inspired by Asiafuturism and Afrofuturism that operate just as efficiently in the established art world as in that of pop.
In The Great Adventure of Material World-Game Film (2020), LuYang adapts the tradition of the journey of initiation through the underworld (represented in Western culture by Virgil’s Aenid and Dante’s Divine Comedy) to the staggered evolution of a metaphysical videogame. The main character (the Lord of the Material World) encounters a series of postgender skeletons and is accompanied by androgynous avatars in the construction of being as an artwork consistent with the thousand worlds that enclose our bodies.
In a contemporary update of Buddhist skepticism, LuYang interrogates the way in which all social and cultural systems operate as a veil cloaking the merely mundane: “We create various ideologies, mental states and social systems in order to rationalize and justify the Material World.” In the space between manga, infomercials, science fiction and self-help ideologies, LuYang’s work radicalizes the way in which contemporary culture understands “the spiritual” as a supermarket of mythologies and philosophy as a bricolage of infinite hybridizations and misunderstandings. At the same time, she defends the idea of “experience” as an opportunity for both external and internal transformation as part of an endless quest. Beyond gender, species and tradition, LuYang’s techno-metaphysical collage offers us an outrageous introduction to a twenty-first century in which, beyond all our technological and economic development, a phenomenology of the materialized spirit yet reigns.
Cuauhtémoc Medina
LuYang
The Great Adventure of Material World-Game Film, 2020
Video
26’22’’
Courtesy of the artist
LuYang
Multimedia artist LuYang creates fantastical, often painful, and shocking images which represent an interdisciplinary blend of religion, philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and modern technology, as well as the allusions to real life forms and structures of natural and religious origin. The output of LuYang’s artistic practice spans game engines, 3D-animated films, video game installations, holograms, motion capture performances, virtual reality and software manipulation. The artist also collaborates with acclaimed scientists, psychologists, performers, dancers, experimental composers, music producers, robotics companies and pop stars. LuYang graduated with a BA and MA from the New Media Art department of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou.
Their work has been featured in major museums and institutions internationally, Lu Yang participated in the 2022 Venice Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions are at: Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2023); Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK (2022-23); PalaisPopulaire, Berlin, Germany (2022 - 23); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus, Denmark (2021–22); Spiral, Tokyo, Japan (2018); M WOODS, Beijing, China (2017–18); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), Beijing, China (2011); and Fukuoka Asia Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan (2011). Recent works in large-scale thematic exhibitions include The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale 2022; Asia Society Triennial 2021, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Shanghai Biennale 2018 and 2012; Athens Biennale 2018; Liverpool Biennial 2016; Montreal International Digital Art Biennial 2016; 56th Venice Biennale 2015 (Chinese Pavilion); and Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 2014. LuYang was awarded the BMW Art Journey in 2019, following which they commenced the making of a new digital body of work titled DOKU. They are also the winner of the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year 2022 award.
Curatorship: Cuauhtémoc Medina
Text: Cuauhtémoc Medina
Content Direction: Ekaterina Álvarez Romero, Cuauhtémoc Medina
Curatorial Coordination: Anaïs Janze
Digital Management: Ana Cristina Sol Sañudo
Content Editing: Roberto Barajas Amieva, Vanessa López García, Yerem Mújica
Toscano
Spanish Translation: Jaime Soler Frost
English Translation: Julianna Neuhouser
Press: Francisco Domínguez Morales, Eduardo Lomas
