What would it be like to experience life, death and religious enlightenment as a video game or immersive environment? This is what Lu Yang tries to do in two mesmerizing exhibitions, at Amant in Brooklyn and the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, that channel Buddhist and Indian philosophy into animated and artificial intelligence images.
While A.I. speeds along, upending any number of careers and lives, some in the art world have chosen to embrace it while also, in a sense, subverting it. These artists — for instance, Ian Cheng, Lawrence Lek or Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, many of them Asian, integrate A.I., gaming and other tech-heavy aesthetics into their work.
More important, A.I. is becoming something of a contested medium, like photography was in the 19th- century, when painters were supposed to draw from life, and to be caught using photographs as reference material could damage an artist’s reputation. A.I. is the new technological bugaboo.
Lu Yang is a Shanghai-born artist, who lives in Tokyo. I first saw his work (the artist is gender-neutral and uses he/him pronouns) on the internet, where there are 80 videos by him on Vimeo. Popular ones include “Uterus Man” (2013), which uses Japanese manga and anime, as well as gaming technology and electronic music, to create an androgynous superhero, and “LuYang Delusional Mandala” (2015), which delves into neuroscience and the Buddhist concept of the afterlife.
Five years ago, in an exhibition devoted to Chinese film and video in Berlin, Lu Yang, who is now 41, was showcased alongside older artists like Cao Fei and Zhang Pelli. Next to their meditative, contemplative video works — Pelli is often referred to as China’s first video artist — Lu Yang’s registered like a frenzied shock to the nervous system.
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