Installation view of Lu Yang, The Great Adventure of Material World, Museum of Moving Image. ©️Hyperallergic
Museum of the Moving Image will present The Great Adventure of Material World (2019–2020) by Lu Yang, one of the artist’s most intricate and conceptually ambitious projects. This marks the work’s first presentation in a U.S. museum.
The work follows an androgynous protagonist, Material World Knight, through distinct episodes that move between conflict, transformation, and renewal, echoing samsara, the ceaseless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth across different planes of existence. The work brings together Buddhist cosmology with visual strategies drawn from video games, anime, and science fiction, reflecting Lu Yang’s ongoing interest in multiplicity, embodiment, and perceptual change.
At MoMI, visitors can experience the environment as either a projected single-channel film or through interactive gameplay, The Great Adventure of Material World-Game Film (2020), in which Material World Knight is continually confronted with trials that challenge attachment to desire and to the self. The protagonist embarks on a quest to find the Vajra, moving through six planes of the bardo, the transitional state between life, death, and rebirth, populated by characters and themes from Lu Yang’s earlier works between 2011 and 2019. Rather than offering linear progression or reward, the journey stages repeated patterns of destruction and renewal.
Lu Yang (born in Shanghai, China; based in Tokyo) is an artist whose practice combines gaming aesthetics, spiritual philosophy, and technologies of simulation to examine identity, the body, and consciousness.
MoMI’s exhibition coincides with Amant’s presentation of Lu Yang: DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe in Brooklyn.
Lu Yang: The Great Adventure of Material World was organized by Regina Harsanyi, MoMI’s Associate Curator of Media Arts.
