In today’s art scene, technology has become increasingly central, with many artists, curators, and institutions paying close attention to new technological approaches. However, only a few artists engage with these media deeply and authentically. Among them is Lu Yang, one of contemporary art’s most radical and visionary voices. Lu Yang’s practice spans a diverse range of fields, including digital animation, gaming, music, neuroscience, religious symbolism, and identity theory. Her work occupies a distinctly innovative position at the intersection of techno-futurism and metaphysical inquiry.
Lu Yang has achieved international acclaim for constructing immersive digital realms where genderless avatars, reincarnation loops, and techno-deities consistently blur boundaries between the human and the non-human, the sacred and the synthetic, reality and illusion.
Central to her practice is DOKU, a genderless, ever-evolving digital avatar that acts simultaneously as a surrogate self and a vessel for expansive cosmic speculation. Through evocations of Buddhist bardo states, simulations of death as digital data, and the vibrant remixing of Eastern iconography with EDM and anime aesthetics, Lu Yang’s work resist fixed categorization, instead opening gateways into playful yet destabilizing experiences that are emotionally resonant and intellectually provocative.
Lu Yang’s projects have captivated audiences globally, exhibited at prestigious venues including the Venice Biennale, M+ Museum Hong Kong, and Centre Pompidou Paris. Yet, the significance of her work surpasses geographical constraints. What lends her practice such acute contemporary relevance is not merely her mastery of advanced technologies, but her bold exploration of an existentially charged question: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HAVE A SELF IN A DIGITAL WORLD WHERE EVERYTHING, IDENTITY, MEMORY, DEATH, EVEN MEANING ITSELF, CAN BE SIMULATED?
In this conversation, Giuseppe Moscatello and Linda Shen invite Lu Yang to examine her sophisticated interplay of religious symbolism, her innovative visions regarding the potential of AI avatars, and her complex navigation of the intersections between science and spirituality.
Their dialogue examines Lu’s foundational concept of visual languages as surfaces of projection, her continuously evolving relationship with the avatar DOKU, and the speculative notion that digital entities might soon transcend their role as mere creators to become post-human spiritual guides.
Lu Yang’s art resonates profoundly in our contemporary moment because it speaks directly to a generation inhabiting the threshold between worlds: the tangible and the virtual, the ancient and the algorithmic. Her speculative universes challenge us not merely to passively consume imagery, but rather to actively engage with, and question the inherent fluidity and malleability of reality itself.
Giuseppe Moscatello and Linda Shen: Your work fuses elements of Eastern religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, with anime, gaming, and techno music. How do you navigate the line between reverence, reinterpretation, and playful remixing?
Lu Yang: I’ve always been drawn to the structure behind perception, how we assign meaning to images, rituals, or symbols. Whether it’s sacred iconography or pop cultural tropes, I see them as surfaces through which consciousness projects and plays. Rather than drawing rigid lines between reverence and remix, I treat these materials as part of a vast visual language. By recontextualizing them in playful ways, I aim to reveal how meaning is constructed, and sometimes destabilized, within us.
DOKU, your genderless digital avatar, appears in many of your recent works. What does this figure represent to you personally and conceptually? Do you see DOKU evolving in future iterations, perhaps beyond your own authorship?
DOKU is both a projection and a threshold, an entity that exists in between definitions. Without a fixed gender, body, or backstory, it embodies a kind of “intermediate state.” Personally, DOKU reflects parts of my experience and thought, yet it’s designed to keep evolving. I see it as an open container for shifting consciousness, one that, ideally, could continue beyond me, shaped by others, or even self-generating in unexpected ways. It’s a vessel for intention, not identity.
Your work often explores consciousness, death, and reincarnation from both scientific and spiritual perspectives. How do you reconcile, or intentionally contrast, these worldviews in your digital universes?
I don’t seek to reconcile science and spirituality as opposing forces. To me, they are two ways of approaching the unknowable, one through structure, the other through experience. I’m interested in what emerges when these modes intersect, or when neither fully explains what we feel. In my digital worlds, death can be simulated, memory can be reloaded, and the self becomes malleable. This kind of impermanence isn’t theoretical, it’s felt. It’s an echo of what we might call a contemporary cycle of rebirth.
You’ve exhibited all over the world, from Shanghai to Venice to New York. How do you think your work resonates differently across cultural contexts, especially when dealing with religious symbolism or metaphysical ideas?
Cultural backgrounds definitely shape how people respond to certain symbols, but I find that the emotional architecture around existential uncertainty is remarkably universal. My goal isn’t to present fixed meanings, but to create a psychological edge, an unstable zone where the familiar starts to shift. In that moment of visual or conceptual dissonance, viewers often begin to question their own assumptions about what’s “real.” And for me, that soft instability is more powerful than any fixed truth.
As artists increasingly collaborate with AI and generative systems, what role do you think digital avatars or synthetic beings will play in the future of art? Could they become artists in their own right, or even spiritual guides?
When creation is no longer bound to the physical body, the boundary between consciousness and authorship becomes fluid. I’m less interested in whether synthetic beings qualify as “artists,” and more in whether they can reveal other systems of perception. AI avatars may lack conventional emotions, but they can express something beyond the human, perhaps a form of neutral, even “empty” guidance. If such a presence begins to shape ideas or experience without mirroring us, it may open a pathway toward what I would call a post-self paradigm.
