A uterus firing eggs at its enemies, a cancer cell singing lullabies while inviting the audience to join in its own funeral song. A face scanned down to the millimeter and reincarnated in six different versions, each corresponding to a realm of the Buddhist Wheel of Life. What holds together images so different, so apparently incompatible? The answer lies entirely in the name of their creator: Lu Yang, an artist born in Shanghai in 1984 who trained in the New Media Art department of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou (a student of Zhang Peili, the pioneer of Chinese video art), and who in every work collapses biomedical horror, kawaii aesthetics and Eastern metaphysics into the same frame, without ever letting one register dominate the others. It’s a philosophical laboratory disguised as an LED screen, where Buddhism, neuroscience, biomedicine and otaku culture are made to collide.
The most original feature of Lu Yang’s work isn’t the use of technology but the way technology is treated as a lens through which to reread ancient doctrines. From early works like Wrathful King Kong Core (2011), the artist stages bodies manipulated by electrical impulses, prosthetics, neural signals, not to indulge a cyberpunk aesthetic, but to raise an uncomfortable, almost clinical question about the relationship between will and biological automatism.
