The Video Game of Life

Born in Shanghai and currently based in Tokyo, artist Lu Yang creates an extraordinary environment at the Museum of the Moving Image, transforming it into a stunning sanctuary of technological spirituality. Visitors are welcomed by a mesmerizing Escher-inspired checkerboard floor as they step into “The Great Adventure of Material World” (2019–20), an enthralling arcade that marries Buddhist cosmology with gaming culture. Displays of screens, projections, and murals are filled with deities, avatars, and cybernetic figures, pulsating with the artist’s exuberant, maximalist aesthetic. The experience is both thrilling and bewildering, achieving a sensory immersion that transcends mere spectacle.

Why utilize video games? For Lu, this playful medium—often regarded as trivial entertainment—serves as a conduit for enlightenment, reinterpreting Buddhist tenets in digital landscapes. He describes the virtual realm as a “container,” a fleeting vessel for consciousness. Within this dynamic space, game mechanics reflect existential realities: the player’s perpetual cycles of challenge, setback, and renewal resonate with samsara, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. By guiding the superhero avatar Material World Knight, participants engage in a ritual of attachment and detachment, embodying the awareness fundamental to Buddhist philosophy. As players invest emotionally in the avatar’s missions—only to face setbacks, demise, and fresh starts—they reenact the essence of existence itself. The avatar represents a continuously evolving self, progressing through nine increasingly fascinating levels that dramatize the conflict of seeking enlightenment while trapped in illusion.

Lu’s creations are inhabited by fractured bodies and polyvalent avatars, such as Cancer Baby, Uterus Man, and Pelvis Chariot, which challenge notions of body, gender, and identity. Balancing on the brink between the grotesque and the adorable, these characters’ elaborately adorned exteriors and imaginative identities resonate with Georges Bataille’s proposition that the exploration of excess and transgression can lead to ecstatic knowledge beyond conventional understanding. In this realm, Lu multiplies into gods, demons, and fantastical creatures, performing a ritualistic casting off of the self through metamorphosis. By utilizing his digitized face and body, he constructs an idol that positions him as both follower and deity, blurring the boundary between reverence and imitation. Recurring in his earlier work, “LuYang Delusional Mandala” (2015), Lu appears seated upon a throne encircled by a glowing halo intertwined with neurosurgical electrodes—a crown merging spiritual awakening with the physical pleasure of the body. This hybrid headpiece harmonizes the sacred with the mundane, connecting aspirations for enlightenment with the highs of technology. Through such gestures, Lu links Buddhist notions of a malleable self with contemporary interpretations of identity crafted with every moment of existence.

However, Lu’s abundance remains grounded in popular culture. By incorporating the emotive languages of gaming and subcultures like anime, arcade visuals, and combat games, he transforms what may appear purely as exhibition into a means for contemplation. In psychological terms, this suggests a form of desublimation — where elevated artistic and spiritual concepts are reinterpreted through the enjoyment found in mass culture. What seems like mere surface appeal becomes an act of meditation, with the absurd, the marginalized, the humorous, and the cute serving as unexpected paths to transcendence.

The delayed debut of “The Great Adventure of Material World” in a U.S. museum, over five years after its creation, may stem from cultural and linguistic differences (the work is presented in Mandarin with English subtitles). Nonetheless, it is precisely through these playful, immersive tools that such barriers can be dismantled. In the game’s recursive framework, Lu finds a global language of metamorphosis that communicates Buddhist wisdom across screens and societal boundaries. His recent DOKU series, initiated during the COVID-19 lockdowns around 2020, is currently showcased at Amant in Brooklyn and at the China Institute’s Metamorphosis, further extending the cycle of rebirth—a digital reincarnation poised for global recognition.

Lu Yang: The Great Adventure of Material World is on view at the Museum of the Moving Image (36-01 35th Avenue, Astoria, Queens) through March 22, 2026. This exhibition was curated by Regina Harsanyi.