Lu Yang is currently presenting his latest video work, titled ‘Doku The Self’, debuting at the Venice Biennale 2022 ‘The Milk of Dreams’, curated by Cecilia Alemani.
Doku The Self is Lu Yang’s first narrative film along in the ongoing Doku series. As the digital avatar of the artist, Doku was born prior to the turbulent and isolated year of 2020 and continued to develop in the following period of uncertainty. By breaking through technological barriers and blending with their digital self with various forms of dancing, exotic costumes, Buddhist doctrines and bodily movement, Lu Yang, for the first time, has injected Doku with his own life experience, and built this video around specific memories and lived experience.
In the film Doku’s personal dream acts as a catalyst for the story and a prelude to a train of events. Lu Yang’s digital avatar experiences a crumbling world and impending doom along with the general inhabitants of the world. This extinction event in the dream shifts into an inevitable awakening — an aircraft flying through clouds and thunderstorms. “Dying in dreams and living in realities”, the artist dissociates himself entirely again while recalling his personal experience, and moves between subject and object with a restrained and calm perspective. From the perceiving of the “overview effect”, Lu Yang has experienced the non-duality of death and birth that will constantly convert and overlap but also coexist in an unbreakable cycle — they are the entity of Saha World.
