Lu Yang – The Doku Trilogy

Lu Yang’s ongoing The DOKU trilogy (2018–2025) explores the dissolution of selfhood across digital, biological, and spiritual systems. Spanning DOKU: Digital Alaya (2021), DOKU: the Self (2022), and DOKU: the Flow (2024), the Shanghai- and Tokyo-based artist combines video game aesthetics, motion capture, and Buddhist philosophy to question where identity resides when consciousness can be rendered, replicated, and endlessly reborn.

At the centre is an avatar based on the artist’s own likeness, moving through multiple realities—from the mundane to the fantastical. Drawing on Yogācāra Buddhism, particularly the concept of ālayavijñāna (“storehouse consciousness”), Lu Yang presents the self not as a stable entity but as a shifting constellation of data, neural processes, and accumulated impressions.

In relation to the VDC 2026 theme Alone or Together?, the trilogy reframes the question at its root: if the self is not fixed, what does it mean to be alone or together at all? The opposition begins to dissolve once the idea of a coherent “you” is called into question.

Here, Buddhist thought and digital culture converge. The DOKU avatar—recognisable yet unbound to any single body—embodies a condition of continuous circulation: present, but never fully locatable.

The exhibition will be on view at FOTO ARSENAL WIEN from May 22 to September 6, 2026.