Lu Yang’s Virtual Avatar Is Endlessly Reborn

The ontological distance between body and flow of data has become minimal for Lu Yang, whose recent videos can be said to be technologically sophisticated Buddhist agitprop. The artist’s exhibition at Amant, ‘DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe’, presents three videos – made with motion capture, 3D animation, game engines and artificial intelligence – that stage various timelines, scenarios and scenographies for Lu Yang’s digital avatar, DOKU, who, after much indulgence, realizes that Buddhist truths lie beyond the world of appearances, and embodiment, even when assisted by advanced technology, is ultimately frivolous.

The single-channel videos DOKU the Self (2022) and DOKU the Flow (2024) play on LED wall panels installed in a deserted garden scene. The latter is flanked by Galsang Aspiration Prayer (Dzogchen Pema Tashi Rinpoche) (2024): seven suspended strips of Xuan paper featuring prayers for the protection of all sentient beings, written in Tibetan calligraphy by Lu Yang’s spiritual teacher. DOKU the Self begins with a spell caster cursing human civilization from mountaintops formed by bodies that have passed through relentless cycles of reincarnation. As the world collapses under his incantation, DOKU, whose face crudely approximates the artist’s, races over corpses and architectural ruins – and then wakes up on a plane. Upon realizing the apocalypse was a dream, he contemplates the porous boundary between truth and fiction, subject and object, life and death, only to meet his demise as the plane crashes.

Episodes of near-death experience and rebirth, such as the sublime encounter in DOKU the Self between DOKU and all past and future versions of himself on the Tibetan Buddhist wheel of life, visualized as a board game, recur across the ‘DOKU’ series (2018–ongoing). While reincarnation in this digital world is always ecstatic – as one concludes from seeing the larger-than-life DOKU dancing deliriously to techno against slickly constructed backdrops that take cues from anime and fantasy film – there is no grand strategy, only accumulated suffering, laid bare by the monumental piles of skeletons near the wheel. DOKU, finally understanding this, projects into outer space, splintering into pieces.

DOKU the Flow reprises and reverses the ending of DOKU the Self. DOKU is again experiencing death, accessing truths about existence, time and reincarnation. Drawing on Buddhist thought, a voice-over opines about the interconnectedness of the actual, the virtual, the possible, the real and the imaginary; this accompanies visuals of DOKU revelling in opulence and material pleasures on a cruise ship named Desire. However, this footage of DOKU is revealed to be no more than a film for another DOKU to watch: attachments to wealth reduce existence to mere fiction. Lu Yang’s script muses on the co-dependence of the structure of spirit and the movement of matter, yet for DOKU there is no material world to reshape, only an infinite river of time flowing through his illusory selves.

DOKU the Creator (2025), screened in an adjacent dimly lit theatre, shares committed aesthetic affinity with bombastic AI-generated imagery and popular music, which is largely absent in the earlier films, but this does not necessarily lead to new revelations. Lu Yang’s expansive, detailed visualization of the cycle of life that channel the frantic world-building of Hieronymus Bosch paintings are certainly welcome. The film is at its most radical when it questions the mythology of contemporary art under late capitalism and its concomitant fictions of authorship, speaking lucidly about the exclusivist networks of social and financial capital that condition art. This message, read alongside Lu Yang’s teacher’s prayers for the subaltern, necessarily gestures towards the political. Still, the artist, rather than resurrecting the figure of the cyborg that once proclaimed the death of God and embraced the utopian project of liberatory technology, insists on returning to metaphysical traditions and deriving the political from the transcendental.

Lu Yang’s ‘DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe’ is on view at Amant, Brooklyn until 15 February 2026

^{Main image: Lu Yang, ‘DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe’, 2025. Courtesy: Amant; photograph: New Document}