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LuYang Vibratory Field – Kunsthalle Basel

By on February 4, 2023

Lu Yang: LuYang Vibratory Field

Kunsthalle Basel

20 January – 21 May 2023

This online presentation features a focused selection of works from Lu Yang’s LuYang Vibratory Field at Kunsthalle Basel, the Shanghai-born artist’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland and one of the most comprehensive presentations of the artist’s production from the last decade, nearly every room will evoke a different cosmos spawned from the videos featured within them.

Installation view, Lu Yang, LuYang Vibratory Field , Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, exhibition view, photo by Philipp Hanger

The works’ humor, depth, and singular magnetism open doors to worlds (and the concerns that accompany them) that may look terrifying and strange but also, at times, not so far from our own.

Lu Yang
Doku The Self, 2022
single channel 4K digital video, edition of 6
36 min 04 sec
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‘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 a 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.

A digital body is surely more convenient and easier to use than the physical body I have now. Yet I still feel that digital avatars are only projections of our concepts and consciousness. We still think we must have a body, in the real or the virtual world, and we still think this body in the virtual world should have a shape that we recognize, of an upright creature affected by gravity and walking on two legs.

ARTNET, Lu Yang: ‘I Felt the Lightning Right Next to Me’, 2022, by Hili Perlson.
Installation view, Lu Yang, LuYang Vibratory Field , Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, exhibition view, photo by Philipp Hanger

Lu Yang’s Kunsthalle presentation is hypnotically disorientating. One moment, you’re sitting on Christian pews in a Buddhist temple and you’re watching brightly colored videos on techno sound, you lie on a dentist’s chair and watch the giant breasts of a robot bunny, you fight virtual enemies in a series of cage-like game stations, and you sit in airplane seats and fly over dystopian landscapes witnessing the digital reincarnation of the artist.

Installation view, Lu Yang, LuYang Vibratory Field , Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, exhibition view, photo by Philipp Hanger
Lu Yang
Uterus Man, 2013
single channel HD digital video, edition of 6
11 min 20 sec
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Lu Yang
LuYang Delusional Crime and Punishment, 2016
single channel HD digital video, edition of 6
14 min 37 sec
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Installation view, Lu Yang, LuYang Vibratory Field , Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, exhibition view, photo by Philipp Hanger

In Delusional Mandala (2015), Lu digitally reconstructs himself as a sexless test subject for a series of neurological experiments, dancing and flailing as it is scanned, syringed and reincarnated in the image of Buddhist figures, eventually speeding across a desert landscape in the guise of a neon-lit truck-cum-hearse-cum-shrine.

Electromagnetic brainology!電磁腦神教! 誕生! from LuYang on Vimeo.

Lu Yang
LuYang Delusional Mandala, 2015
single channel HD digital video, edition of 6
16 min 27 sec
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From the temple to the airport, the different spaces of the exhibition are testimony to Lu Yang’s wildly frenetic imagination. Winner of the 2022 Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year” award, his world-building proves to be as much virtual as physical. The works’ humor, depth, and singular magnetism open doors to worlds that may look terrifying and strange but also, at times, not so far from our own.

Lu Yang
Electromagnetic Brainology, 2017
5 channel HD digital video, edition of 6
Electromagnetic Brainology 13 min 34 sec; Air 2 min 24 sec; Earth 1 min 43 sec; Fire 2 min 23 sec; Water 3 min 51 sec
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Lu’s matter-of-fact conceptualism is inflected by his more sensationalist genre instincts, often funny and irreverently deployed, though at times given to questionable indulgence in tropes around deformity and disability.

FRIEZE, ‘Lu Yang’s Final Fantasy’, by Gary Zhexi Zhang, 2019
Installation view, Lu Yang, LuYang Vibratory Field , Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, exhibition view, photo by Philipp Hanger
Lu Yang
Material World Knight – Vajra #1, 2021
24V LED illuminated, high resolution fabric print, silver oxidized aluminum frame, separate external LED driver
140 x 140 x 6 cm 55 1/8 x 55 1/8 x 2 3/8 inches
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Installation view, Lu Yang, LuYang Vibratory Field , Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, exhibition view, photo by Philipp Hanger
Lu Yang
The Great Adventure of Material World – Game Film,, 2020
single channel HD digital video, edition of 6
26 min 22 sec
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Lu Yang’s creation The Great Adventure of the Material World is the second work in his Material World Knight series and also the most challenging work in both the interactive game and single channel video forms. His work The Material World Knight series create an ideology distinct from current society and bring together many characters from previous works to form her own league of legends. In the material world, audiences will be led by the protagonist—The Material World Knight to go through multiple identity transformations by exploring the universe, acquiring energy, being destroyed and reborn and experiencing internal fight with their own emotions, desires and themselves. The Great Adventure of the Material World contains all the distinctive elements of Lu Yang’s previous works to construct a virtual game world.

While some of Lu Yang’s games follow the typical role-playing gaming format with narratives geared toward completing “quests,” battling (or ducking) enemies, and achieving “victory,” Lu Yang uses them all to explore the (sometimes traumatizing) spiritual plane of existence, rather than simply to entertain by way of a competitive, adrenaline-fueled format.

Lu Yang
God of the Brain, 2017
single channel 1080 HD digital video, edition of 6
8 min 3 sec
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Installation view, Lu Yang, LuYang Vibratory Field , Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, exhibition view, photo by Philipp Hanger

LuYang Vibratory Field is on view at Kunsthalle, Basel now until 21 May 2023

The exhibition is curated by Elena Filipovic, Director at Kunsthalle Basel

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