DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe

DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe is the first institutional solo exhibition in New York by Lu Yang, whose practice in 3D animation and video installation examines the limits of identity, consciousness, and embodiment in a digitized world.

The exhibition centers on DOKU, a virtual avatar modeled on the artist’s own body and face. Referencing the Japanese Buddhist phrase dokusho dokushi—“We are born alone, and we die alone”—DOKU serves as both a personal surrogate and philosophical vessel, navigating a cosmos where spiritual belief, neuroscience, and technological mediation converge.

DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe brings together three major, feature-length video works in Lu Yang’s ongoing DOKU cycle. In 306 Maujer, DOKU the Self (2022) and DOKU the Flow (2024) are displayed within a landscape installation that suggests a continuation of the garden just beyond the gallery’s walls. DOKU the Self follows Lu Yang’s avatar through states of drift and fragmentation: aboard a commercial flight, submerged in dreamlike memory, and reborn through cycles of reincarnation. DOKU the Flow expands this inquiry through the lens of Madhyamaka Buddhism, which posits that all phenomena are void of inherent essence. Embracing a nonlinear, recursive structure, the work resists narrative closure, underscoring the avatar’s movement not toward self-realization but toward the dissolution of the self as such.