As hysteria over AI reached a fever pitch this year, artists began tackling the technology’s implications in refreshingly off-kilter ways. Shanghai-born, Tokyo-based artist Lu Yang is a case in point. Though the artist has been creating videos, installations, and interactive works featuring his virtual avatar Doku since 2020, this year Yang debuted a new installation, DOKU the Creator, that became the talk of Art Basel Hong Kong. (It later traveled in a modified form to the Amant art space in Brooklyn.) The piece is a sensory overload of an installation anchored by an hour-long video in which Doku moves through a surreal dreamscape that blends video game animation with AI-generated imagery.
In Hong Kong, the video was presented inside an interactive installation that included a pop-up store. Works were sold in “blind boxes,” each hiding one of 108 possible pieces—a setup that laid bare the casino-like nature of the art market. The video and its surrounding environment evoke an art world in which the artist is no longer essential to the system’s functioning. Doku appears to operate autonomously, free to create, destroy, and mourn the value of art without any mediation by its creator. What distinguishes Yang’s work from other AI critiques is that he seems unbothered by this state of affairs. Drawing on Buddhist philosophy, he suggests that all creation functions like an algorithm—endlessly combining and recombining the totality of human thought and creativity into conceptual forms. Our mistake, he implies, is in attaching too much meaning to the artist, or their originality, at all. In the end, they are all temporary illusions. —Harrison Jacobs
