Lu Yang: Āśrava World
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COMA is pleased to present a solo presentation, titled Āśrava World, by Shanghai-based new media artist Lu Yang, on view 21 May – 3 July, 2021 in the gallery.
The term Āśrava, used in Buddhist scripture, philosophy, and psychology, refers to mental defilements of sensual pleasures that perpetuate samsara, the beginningless cycle of rebirth, dukkha, and dying again. This exhibition takes two of Lu Yang’s interconnected videos created between 2018 – 2020, “Material World Knight” and “The Great Adventure of Material World” – presented here as an interactive video game and film – as the main thread of narrative. Āśrava World is a comprehensive presentation of the artist’s simultaneous inward facing analysis of self and their outward searching dialogue, centred on ultimate unsolved propositions such as the world, existence, binary opposition, sexuality, the end of time and samsara, through virtual scenes and locales rendered by software.
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Lu Yang
The Great Adventure Of Material World – Game (video still), 2019
single-player role-playing computer game, edition 2 of 6
durational experienceActing as a small-scale retrospective of sorts, Lu Yang’s Āśrava World takes the viewer from the forming of the Material World Knight character in the 3 channel artwork title of the same name, through to the playable adventure that the character experiences. The works in the exhibition span three years and address various topics prevalent in the artists work across this period. -
"I use an avatar of myself because I cannot do harm to another…I think artists throughout history have used their own image so they can mutilate it without guilt. One aspect of Buddhism is to understand that you’re eventually going to die, so you need to process that death. Once you have done that, you can give up the “me” or the “I” idea and move forward."
Lu Yang
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Artworks
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Installation Views
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Lu Yang in his studio, Shanghai, China, 2019
