LuYang Vibratory Field – Kunsthalle Basel

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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

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.

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