Pixels and Paradox
Stillness within the Spectacle
In December 2023, artist LuYang's dynamic images took over all 92 video billboards in New York’s Times Square.
The kaleidoscopic spectacle was their exploration of the tension between the meditative self and the hyperreal fantasia of consumer modernity.
LuYang (born Shanghai 1984) has made a series of artworks using gaming technology, starring their androgynous digital avatar “Doku,” modeled on a 3D-scanned copy of the artist’s own face.
I always want to be surprised by art, jolted out of my conventional worldview. I was immediately intrigued by LuYang's 2022 video DOKU the Self, a 36-minute 3D animation that I first saw on a big-screen at the Rubin Museum, where it attracted a large audience, including many fascinated children.
The video is inspired by a personal experience LuYang had on a turbulent flight during a lightning storm that nearly resulted in a crash.
This near-death event acts as a catalyst for their avatar Doku's mythic journey: just as Dante travelled through the realms of the Christian Otherworld, LuYang’s clone moves through the various Buddhist realms of heaven and hell.
The work features six dazzling reincarnations of Doku, each dancing in one of the realms of samsara — the karmic cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Each domain is made vivid by LuYang’s CGI landscapes.
The god-version of Doku in the celestial dimension may be relatively happier than the damned incarnation in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, but is still attached to an ego-self, caught in the Wheel of Existence.
In the climax, Doku is savaged by vultures, ascends into the stratosphere, and finally disintegrates into crystalline particles. The character’s voiceover asks: what remains of the self?
But of course, there's irony here. Doku the avatar is just a set of pixels on a screen – it has no true presence or sentient awareness. What we witness on-screen is not a fellow Being but a glamorous shell – intricately fabricated, but devoid of heart. Doku has no essential depth; it is just a mesmerizing 3D puppet.
Yet I am moved by Doku’s death. LuYang has essentially dramatized their own extinction.
This tension sets up the work’s paradox: techno artifice vs. deep stillness. The dazzling video is a glittering empty spectacle, but it still evokes a tender response in me, a lucid meditative witness.
Watching the travails of Doku, where is my own awareness, as this mammalian body ages each day and slowly deteriorates?
Standing in Times Square, immersed within an open cathedral of flashing lights & noise, there is an inner hush – the calm center of the ever-spinning Wheel.
*** All artwork shown is copyright the artist LuYang ***
NOTES:
Video of the artist viewing the Times Square billboard display: Lu Yang on December 2023 Midnight Moment: "DOKU: Digital Reincarnation"
Link to the full 36-minute Doku video: http://luyang.asia/2023/05/20/doku-the-self/
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Stunning work that provokes so much thought - thank you for sharing.