Shanghai-born, Tokyo-based artist Lu Yang transforms the Museum of the Moving Image into a dazzling temple of digital devotion. Guided by an Escher-like checkerboard floor, visitors enter “The Great Adventure of Material World” (2019–20), a hypnotic arcade where Buddhist cosmology refracts through gaming culture. Screens, projections, and murals overflow with deities, avatars, and cybernetic bodies, radiating Lu’s delirious, maximalist energy. The result is a world at once ecstatic and disorienting — a sensory overload that turns spectacle into revelation.
Why a video game? For Lu, the medium of play — so often dismissed as mere entertainment — becomes a vehicle for awakening, translating Buddhist philosophy into digital form. The virtual world, as the artist describes, is a “container,” a temporary vessel through which consciousness flows. Within this shifting realm, the logic of the game mirrors the logic of being itself: The player’s endless cycles of challenge, failure, and renewal echo samsara, the karmic loop of birth, death, and rebirth. Following the superhero avatar Material World Knight, viewers participate in a practice of attachment and detachment, enacting the very awareness at the heart of the thought system. As players invest emotionally in the avatar’s quests — only to lose progress, die, and begin again — they rehearse the cycle of grasping and release that defines existence itself. The avatar embodies a self perpetually in flux, advancing through nine levels that dramatize the paradox of striving toward enlightenment within illusion.
