*Original article is available in Italian
At Espace Louis Vuitton Venice, Lu Yang (b. 1984, Shanghai) transforms the brand’s space into a wedding altar for his avatar. Curated by Claire Staebler, *DOKU The Illusion* (until October 4) is the fourth chapter of a cycle built around a digital alter ego bearing his face: an environment between waking and dreaming, made of LED screens, two Buddha figures holding the wheel of life, and a mirrored ceiling that swallows the visitor into the worlds evoked by Lu Yang’s art.
Shuttling between Shanghai and Tokyo, the artist explores depths few dare to enter: the intersection of neuroscience, esoteric Buddhism, game engines, manga, and otaku culture. His worlds use the grammar of machinima and world-building to address questions Asian thought has long engaged: the body as impermanent assemblage, identity as operational illusion, death as transit. Since digitally mapping his face in 2020 to generate DOKU, the artist has pushed the avatar toward an independent life—killing it, reincarnating it, multiplying it, until recognizing it as a “Creator with its own agency.” This gesture speaks the language of Donna Haraway and James Bridle, of a posthumanism that does not celebrate the machine but uses it to rethink what a subject, a species, or a world might be. The artist interweaves the cosmotechnics of philosopher Yuk Hui with themes of the end of human exceptionalism, technological sublimity, and cohabitation with other intelligences.
In a Biennale often more committed to illustrating the present than imagining what comes next, few artists today have the courage to build a cosmos from scratch. Lu Yang does so with monastic discipline and streamer fury, in an imaginary that is both sacred and kawaii, sublime and grotesque, where the future is no longer on the horizon—it is the grammar through which the present already tells itself. We asked the artist to guide us through his visions.
Q: "DOKU The Illusion" confronts the nature of illusion at precisely the moment when AI makes real and synthetic images indistinguishable. For a practicing Buddhist who quotes the Yuanjue Jing and Mipham Rinpoche's "Debate between Awakening and Dream," what does it mean to cross this historical moment when philosophical illusion and technological illusion collapse into each other?
One of the most touching aspects of Buddhist thought, for me, is that it never treats what we call the “real world” as a given premise. Many Buddhist texts compare the world we take as real to a dream, an illusion, a mirage, a reflection in a mirror, a magical display. Whenever I encounter these metaphors, I am moved by the precision and breadth of the Buddha's wisdom. It does not merely say “the world is false”; it asks a more radical question. Is the subject who judges true and false really standing outside illusion? In this sense, the Yuanjue Jing is crucial to me: “To know illusion is already to be apart from it; no method is needed. To be apart from illusion is already awakening; no gradual stages exist.” This is not an instruction to escape all appearances, nor to seek an absolutely secure reality beyond the world. It shows that when illusion is recognized as illusion, attachment to it has already begun to loosen. Another idea from the Yuanjue Jing that deeply moves me is “cultivating illusion through illusion.” For me, this becomes a highly contemporary methodology. If the reality we cling to is already dreamlike and illusory, then AI, virtual bodies, graphic engines, and digital images are neither inferior to nor more false than the real. They can become reversed tools: using illusion to illuminate illusion, using the virtual to examine how our so-called reality is constructed. Today, facing AI, virtual worlds, synthetic images, and simulations, we very naturally stand on one side and say, “I am real, that is artificial”; “my world is real, that world is virtual.” But this is precisely what interests me. From a Buddhist perspective, the question is not just whether an AI-generated image is true or false, but why we are so sure that the “I” judging it as illusion is not itself part of a deeper illusion. This also brings to mind a passage from the Daodejing: “When all recognize beauty as beauty, ugliness is already present; when all recognize goodness as goodness, non-goodness is already present.” When we identify something as “beautiful,” the opposite has already been produced. When we identify something as “true,” the “false” has already been placed before it. Long and short, high and low, being and non-being, difficult and easy arise through mutual reference. Duality is not an absolute fact preceding perception; it is a structure generated in the act of distinction, comparison, and naming. What interests me most in the age of AI is therefore not that “real images” and “virtual images” have become indistinguishable. It is that our trust in the real has begun to tremble. We believe we stand on the side of reality judging the virtual, but perhaps the very position from which we judge is already part of the mechanism of illusion. That is why the Yuanjue Jing and Mipham Rinpoche's “Debate between Awakening and Dream” are so important to me. They do not use the dream simply as a metaphor for the world; they create a structure for examining the real. The awakened one and the dreamer question each other. The boundary between waking and dreaming is constantly overturned. Reality is no longer accepted as given: it must be examined. I do not see philosophical illusion and technological illusion as two separate phenomena that have suddenly merged. Rather, AI has made visible, in a concrete and sensory way, a question Buddhism has long asked: can appearances function, seduce, frighten, and convince us even when they possess no fixed and self-sufficient essence? For me, “DOKU The Illusion” is not about using Buddhism to explain AI, nor using AI to illustrate Buddhism. It is a space in which the two illuminate and question each other. AI generates unstable appearances; Buddhist thought allows me to question the subject who experiences those appearances, believes in them, fears them, or rejects them. It is not only whether the virtual world is real that must be examined, but how our so-called real world comes to present itself as real in the first place.
Q: In this fourth chapter, AI-generated imagery alternates with live-action footage shot on the Izu Peninsula: deep blue skies, Japanese landscapes, a car traveling on real roads. For the first time in the series, the “real” enters DOKU's world. Why Izu and why now? Elsewhere, the digital is colonizing the physical; here, the opposite seems to be happening.
Izu is not simply a location for me, nor did I choose it to add a sense of “reality” to the work. Since the first chapter of the DOKU series, many fundamental inspirations came to me while I sat alone meditating, or simply gazing at the sea, on the volcanic cliffs of Izu's coast. Those who know my earlier work might imagine that, in a sense, each chapter was slowly conceived while I sat alone on the edge of those cliffs. After completing “DOKU The Self” (the first DOKU work shown at the 2022 Venice Biennale), I moved to Tokyo. Since then, I have often driven alone to Izu, stopping between sea, cliffs, hot springs, galleries, mountain roads, and small strange museums. Izu-Kōgen has always felt deeply healing and deeply strange to me. Coastline, volcanic rock, hot springs, amusement parks, wax museums, zoos, and many spaces suspended between tourism, dream, ruin, childhood fantasy, and hallucination. For me, it is not a purely realistic place; it resembles a dreamlike interface already existing within the physical world. In “DOKU The Illusion,” I do not think “reality” is entering DOKU's world for the first time. I rather see the real foundation of DOKU's world becoming visible. Izu has always been one of the spiritual birthplaces of this series. My dreams, my practice, my solitude, my visual system, and my real life have all overlapped there. Izu is not an external world for me; it is already part of DOKU's inner world. Izu also carries important Buddhist historical and geographical connections. In the legend of Shuzenji, Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi) visited the area in 807. Moved by a young boy's filial devotion, washing his sick father in the cold water of the Katsura River, he struck a rock in the river with his single-pronged vajra, causing a hot spring to gush forth. It became known as Tokko-no-yu. This legend is dear to me because one of DOKU's historical weapons is also the single-pronged vajra. The sound “dokko” is also very close to DOKU. This accidental phonetic overlap appears to me as a hidden linguistic clue. The name DOKU comes from the idea of “being born alone and dying alone,” while the single-pronged vajra is a ritual implement in esoteric Buddhism symbolizing wisdom and the cutting of ignorance. When the two sounds come close, I feel a natural connection between DOKU's digital body and Izu's Buddhist geography. Izu also preserves stories and legends related to the exile of Nichiren Shōnin. In 1261, Nichiren was exiled to Izu, an event often referred to as Izu Hōnan. Along the Jogasaki coast, near Renchaku-ji, there is a rock associated with this legend called Manaita-iwa, literally “cutting-board rock.” According to legend, after being led from Kamakura to Izu, Nichiren was abandoned on this rock in the sea under Cape Nichiren-zaki, and later saved by a local fisherman, Funamori Yasaburō. This part touches me deeply. My work has long been easily perceived as heterodox, marginal, difficult to classify. It does not entirely belong to the traditional art system, nor to religion, technology, video games, or popular culture. Nichiren Shōnin is naturally an immense religious figure, and I would never dream of comparing myself to him on that level. But in the structure of being perceived as heterodox by an existing order, I feel a distant resonance. Sometimes something is deemed heretical not because it has strayed from the truth, but because it touches a part of reality that the existing order cannot absorb. In “DOKU The Illusion,” there is a section where DOKU encounters Nichiren Shōnin, and I did go to film the coast and rocks related to the exile legend. Bringing those real places into the work was not about adding documentary reality. It was about letting reality itself become part of the structure of illusion. Reality is not a more stable foundation than the virtual: it too carries legend, karma, history, projection, and spiritual resonance. The red Toyota Prius in the film is my own car. On its body there is a mantra known as the “mantra of liberation through seeing.” This mantra is not a decoration. It carries a vow: that whoever sees this car, even unknowingly or only for a moment, may plant a small seed of wisdom related to liberation. I often drive this car alone between Tokyo and Izu, so it is not a scene. It is a real mobile space of my daily life. It is like a vehicle of liberation, and also a container moving between reality and dream.
Q: In Venice, you transformed the Espace Louis Vuitton into a “cybernetic sanctuary,” a dispositif that is overtly liturgical. Yet it unfolds within a luxury brand space, during the Biennale, inside the global art system. How do you hold together the sacred iconography of Buddhism and the apparatus of spectacle, without the former being reduced to mere style?
The point, for me, is not to place Buddhist iconography inside a luxury brand space and turn it into a kind of mystical Eastern style. In my work, Buddhist imagery is not decoration: it is a structure of perception, and also a system of wisdom that constantly reminds us that appearance does not coincide with essence. In Mipham Rinpoche's “Debate between Awakening and Dream,” the waking state and the dream state debate which is more real. In the end, the wisdom judge delivers the verdict: “Both are true and both are false. Without examination, each is true in its own position; under examination, the defect of each is exposed. In reality, the two are equal and without difference.” And finally: “From that moment, the two merged into one; and the one dissolved into the void.” This structure is crucial to me. In “DOKU The Illusion,” I have therefore transformed this union of waking and dream into a wedding ritual. Reality and illusion, virtual and physical, waking and dreaming are temporarily united in the ceremony, and finally dissolve together. The exhibition space at Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia is my reconstruction of this wedding chapel in the physical world. The audience does not just watch the work from outside: they enter the ritual and become guests and witnesses to this illusory marriage. I am fully aware that this installation takes place within a Louis Vuitton space, during the Venice Biennale, inside the global art system. But I do not believe this necessarily weakens the power of the Buddhist imagery. On the contrary, this tension is part of the work. Luxury, the Biennale, the art system, the visitor's desire to look, the circulation of images on social media—all of this is also part of the contemporary mechanism of illusion. I am therefore not trying to place something “purely sacred” inside a “profane spectacle,” nor do I use Buddhism to purify a brand's space. I am more interested in these two systems illuminating each other. Buddhist imagery enters the spectacle not to become decoration, but to expose the very structure of spectacle: how desire is produced, how identity is projected, how images are worshipped. In a sense, the LED screen is the altar of contemporary life. Every day, we watch luminous screens and offer them attention, desire, fear, identity, time. When I place an LED screen within an altar-like structure, I am not sacralizing technology; I am making visible the worship of the screen that already exists in our time. The mirrored ceiling works the same way. When visitors look up, they encounter another version of themselves reflected in the exhibition space. Not only to create immersion, but to show that they are not outside the illusion as neutral observers. The visitor is also inside the image, and inside the mechanism of desire. This space is therefore not a sanctuary in the traditional sense: it is a temporary threshold. Its sacredness does not come from a fixed religious appearance, but from its ability to make people's perception of looking, desire, and the real tremble. As long as the Buddhist imagery continues to remind us that all appearances are not fixed and self-sufficient entities, then it is not just style.
Q: You have said two very strong things: that you chose art not as a vocation but as a “perfect cover”—a strategy to move between various languages without being confined to a single discipline; and that you use your artistic career as a professional constraint that prevents you from abandoning spiritual practice out of laziness. But today you operate within the global circuit of major institutions. Does that intimate constraint still hold, or is there a risk that the art system transforms practice into the language of performance?
I don't deny saying both things. Art indeed works for me as a cover. It allows me to move between religion, neuroscience, technology, video games, moving image, and popular culture without being completely confined to a single disciplinary system. At the same time, my artistic career functions as a kind of professional constraint. It forces me to constantly return to questions I cannot avoid: the body, death, the self, illusion, suffering, attachment, liberation. But I don't want to idealize this too much. The art system can naturally transform inner practice into a form of performance. I often reflect on this, and sometimes I wonder if I risk doing that too. In fact, because the intensity of work is often so overwhelming, I frequently fail to consistently carry out the tasks of spiritual practice. Of course, “failing” can also be an excuse. If something is truly a top priority, one should always find a little time for it. So I also question my motivations. I wonder if that so-called sense of mission is sometimes mixed with attachment to reputation, recognition, influence, worldly gain. When spiritual practice, AI, virtual identity, and the global art system are brought together, this question cannot be easily evaded. It is itself a test I must continue to face. I perceive very clearly that almost all my mental capacity is occupied by creation. I am not a person who particularly enjoys social performance. On the contrary, I often resist social media management, and I do not like appearing in worldly situations constantly playing the identity of the “artist.” If my goal were simply self-promotion, my way of acting would probably not be the most efficient. The only thing I am relatively certain of is that creation remains the strongest inner drive of my life. I can only feel fulfilled by working, acting, accepting the price to pay. However painful the process, however much it consumes body and mind, it seems I can only continue this way. Perhaps it is the provisional method of “cultivating illusion through illusion” that I can currently understand: using the illusory system of art to work with another, deeper system of illusion; and using the physical fatigue, desire, pain, and attachment within creation to examine my own motivations in turn. I am still far from purity, so I can only continue observing myself, without easily giving myself a right answer. I can only say that when I devote myself to creation with greater sincerity (or at least try to approach what I mean by sincerity), the work seems to touch others more deeply. Over the years, I have continually received letters and messages from viewers telling me how my work has changed their gaze on the body, on life, on death, on identity, or on the real, and even prompted them to reflect on consciousness, the self, and the relationship between self and world. Every time I read these responses, I feel that perhaps this work still has meaning. For me, then, the art system can indeed transform inner practice into performance, but it can also become a field in which I test myself. What matters is whether I am still willing to continue examining my motivations: am I using a certain spiritual language to build an identity, or am I using the work to honestly face questions I cannot resolve? This answer is never exhausted once and for all. One can only continue to examine it through every act of creation, every moment of exhaustion, every doubt, every experience of being seen or misunderstood.
Q: You have said that you digitized your face not simply to create an avatar but to produce distance: “If that digital shell is Lu Yang, then who is the 'I' observing it?” That is the apparatus of anatman. Meanwhile, we live in a present where the face as an identity marker is undergoing an epochal crisis. Did your intuition about ten years ago anticipate what we are experiencing now? And how does the meaning of “distance” change when the loss of the face is no longer a spiritual choice but a widespread technical condition?
The first time I really used my face as material in the work was in 2015, in “LuYang Delusional Mandala.” That work contained many taboo themes related to the body, illness, death, medicine, and consciousness. For me, putting my face and body into the work was not about creating an avatar. It was rather about allowing things that usually happen to “others” to be simulated as if happening to “me.” That process was extremely immersive: a kind of digital-era meditation on impurity or impermanence. I could watch a body constructed from myself being opened, modified, invaded by illness, analyzed by medical systems, surrounded by death and fear. None of this was actually happening to my physical body, but the psychological transference was strong. It also reminds me of the rubber hand illusion in psychology: when a rubber hand is touched while the hidden real hand is touched at the same time, participants gradually begin to feel the rubber hand as their own. This shows that the sense of “my body” is by no means fixed, but can be reorganized through visual, tactile, and perceptual conditions. My experience with video games has also shaped my understanding of the body. In a game, a character can change skin, equipment, appearance, gender, species, even the entire body system at any time. The player nevertheless continues to recognize that changing character as “the body I am governing.” This made me realize very early that identity is not necessarily fixed to a stable appearance: it is temporarily constructed through looking, commanding, inhabiting, and ongoing experience. Around 2019, I felt that Unreal Engine and real-time rendering had reached a point where digital figures could become more realistic, more like sustainable body systems. That is when I began to develop DOKU. DOKU continues the body experiments of earlier works, but is no longer just a body to be observed or modified. It gradually becomes a digital existence that can act, reincarnate, die, return, mutate form, even look back at me. I do not think I “predicted” the current era of AI face cloning. But I began to feel very early that face and body are not such stable markers of identity. Today, AI has transformed this distance, from a personal and voluntary spiritual experiment, into a technical condition anyone can encounter. Anyone's face can be copied, recomposed, generated, misused. In the past, I actively created this distance. Today, technology may force everyone to experience it passively. You do not necessarily choose to leave your face: technology may cause your face to leave you. For me, then, DOKU's digital body is not to preserve myself, nor to celebrate technological immortality. It is rather an observation device that allows me to look again at how an “I” is temporarily constructed through face, body, skin, image, gaze, command, and attachment.
Q: In “DOKU The Creator,” the avatar stops being a character under your control and becomes, as you have said, “a Creator with its own agency.” In “The Illusion,” DOKU meets its double. Here, the “death of the author” ceases to be a critical metaphor and becomes a technical passage. When the avatar becomes the author, what remains of Lu Yang? And what does it mean, for an artist, to be the author of one's own double?
In the third chapter of DOKU, from 2025, “DOKU The Creator,” I had already begun to explore this question. An idea crucial to me in that work is that creation does not arise from absolute nothingness. What we call creation is often a new combination of existing materials, memories, technologies, desires, images, knowledge, and conditions. The creator is not an absolute origin standing outside the world, but someone who reorganizes, connects, and reveals things through already given conditions. When I say that in “The Creator” DOKU becomes a Creator with its own agency, I do not mean that he has completely separated from me and become an independent subject capable of replacing me. I am trying, more precisely, to make the position of the “author” itself unstable. Who is creating? Is Lu Yang creating DOKU, or is DOKU also creating, in return, a new Lu Yang? Is the artist using technology, or are technology, images, viewers, memory, and desire also shaping the artist? In “DOKU The Illusion,” the encounter between DOKU and his double is not just a sci-fi plot. That double is designed as part of the dialectic between real and virtual. It works as a mirror structure: when DOKU sees another DOKU, he must face the question of which self is “true” and which self is “false.” At a deeper level, however, real and virtual are not simply opposed: they support each other, define each other, dismantle each other. This double structure also connects to my interest in Jungian psychology, particularly ideas of integration, shadow, and the unconscious. The double is not only an enemy, nor only a copy. It can be the excluded part, the repressed part, the unrecognized part, the other side that the subject must face again. Integration does not mean destroying another self. It means recognizing that the subject was never, from the beginning, a unified, transparent, complete center. As for what remains of Lu Yang when the avatar becomes the author, I am not actually very concerned with this question. I do not want to place it in the anxiety of whether “Lu Yang” will be replaced. From a broader perspective, that anxiety already reveals an attachment to authorship, control, originality, and to the idea that what I create continues to belong to me. But these are not things I can truly control. I cannot even control my birth and death, karma, liberation: how could I completely control how a work, a character, a digital body will be seen, understood, and continue to transform in the future? DOKU is not there to confirm Lu Yang's position as author, nor to replace Lu Yang. He is more a channel to generate questions, a process through which I continue to think about the “I,” creation, control, the real, the virtual, and subjectivity. I use DOKU to open questions, not to close them. It is also close to the method of “cultivating illusion through illusion.” DOKU is an illusion, the avatar is an illusion, and the author's identity is also an illusion. Precisely because they are illusions, they can serve to observe deeper forms of attachment. The important question is not what remains of Lu Yang after DOKU becomes the author, but whether this process can show me why I still need a Lu Yang to remain there.
Q: You have spoken of a paradox of the present: while technology explodes, “we feel wisdom disappearing.” A lucid and politically urgent observation. What role can an artist play today in this gap? Is your work diagnosis, protest, or an attempt to transmit a wisdom we are forgetting in real time?
I am not very interested in defining my work as analysis or taking a stand. It may contain some diagnosis, because I observe the symptoms of this time. It may contain some protest, because I do not want to fully obey the reality produced by technology and the market. But more importantly, I hope the work can become a condition through which people begin to perceive the problem differently. Today, more and more attention is paid to the tools themselves: AI, virtual reality, generative images, extraterrestrial civilizations, post-human bodies, technological singularity. We keep discussing where these tools will take us, but we seem to rarely address the questions never really resolved: how to face suffering, how to work with dukkha, how to handle greed, fear, anger, loneliness, desire, death, and the evil humans keep inflicting on each other. While our world still struggles with war, hunger, poverty, identity conflicts, and ideological divisions, we often use very sophisticated language to fear AI, alien civilizations, or some future force that might invade humanity. But sometimes I feel these fears are also projections of our mind. We fear that what we have created will turn against us and dominate us, but we are not always willing to admit that what has long dominated us is not AI, but our unresolved greed, hatred, ignorance, and attachment. Technology gives us ever more powerful productive capacities, but the capacity to produce does not coincide with wisdom. We can generate more realistic images, more complex virtual bodies, and larger data systems, without thereby understanding suffering more deeply, knowing how to face death, becoming more capable of living with others, or moving closer to liberation. We can continue to generate new worlds, without knowing where these worlds are leading our mind. The “disappearance of wisdom” does not mean for me that the ancient world was necessarily better than the modern one. It means that we become increasingly skilled at producing worlds externally, and not necessarily more capable of understanding ourselves internally. An artist naturally cannot directly solve war, hunger, conflict. But art can alter the conditions of perception: it can move the viewer slightly from habitual reality, allowing them to look again at the body, the self, life, death, the virtual world, and reality itself. I prefer to understand my work as an effort on the level of causes. A work may not change anything immediately, but it can plant a seed in someone's mind. Perhaps many years later, when that person faces again their own body, identity, suffering, or death, that seed can continue to act in some way. My work does not transmit wisdom directly to the audience. Wisdom cannot be transferred like a file: it can only be slowly awakened through experience, looking, shock, doubt, and repeated reflection. What I can do is use the tools of my time (AI, virtual bodies, graphic engines, sound, moving images, immersive spaces) to create a field in which ancient questions become perceivable again: who am I? What is real? What is the body? Where does suffering come from? Why are we so attached to continuing to exist? If the work is doing something, perhaps it is not exactly diagnosis or protest, but a form of reminder. It reminds us that while technology continues to expand outward, we may need with even more urgency to look inward again. Otherwise, we may acquire ever more powerful capacities to generate worlds, and become ever less capable of facing our own mind.
Q: In the press release accompanying the exhibition, it is stated that for you manga, anime, and video games are a “formal vocabulary,” not the conceptual foundation of the work. That vocabulary, however, carries a very precise aesthetic: post-apocalyptic, hyper-saturated, kawaii and violent at the same time. Is there not a risk that a language chosen as a mere “vehicle” ends up shaping the content? Can the otaku visual grammar really be used as a neutral language?
I don't think any visual language is truly neutral. Manga, anime, video games, tokusatsu, idol culture, even the museum white cube and the language of so-called “serious art” are not neutral. They all carry stories, desires, habits of looking, emotional codes. When I say that manga, anime, and video games are my formal vocabulary, and not the conceptual foundation of the work, I do not mean they have no influence on content. I mean they are not the ultimate core the work aims to reach: they are the linguistic system through which I enter questions, organize experience, create bodies and worlds. These visual languages are not styles chosen later. They are more like the visual mother tongue with which I grew up. They have shaped the way I imagine bodies, death, transformation, reincarnation, battle, deities, monsters, the collapse of worlds. They thus naturally influence content, but it is a structural rather than decorative influence. Kawaii and violence, post-apocalypse and hyper-saturation, sacred and absurd, horror and tenderness: in my work they are not simple contrasts. They are closer to the way I experience reality. Reality itself is already mixed in this way: suffering and pleasure happen together, death and consumption coexist, images of disaster and kawaii images can appear on the same screen. I would not say that the otaku visual grammar is a neutral language. It is obviously not entirely neutral. But not being neutral does not mean it cannot be used. The point is to understand what it carries, and how it is used. It works for me as a high-intensity interface: the viewer can be initially attracted by color, speed, characters, visual energy, but once inside, they encounter questions about the body, the self, death, desire, illusion, and the real. Perhaps it is precisely because this visual language is not pure that it suits my work. It already contains consumption, desire, fear, tenderness, violence, fantasy, and technology. My task is not to pretend it is neutral, but to use its force while letting its contradictions emerge together.
Q: We said that the meaning of “DOKU” incorporates birth and death, yet DOKU, being digital, paradoxically might never die: the face you digitized, the archive of films, the model that generates him could survive “Lu Yang” for a very long time. Your saga has now reached its fourth chapter, and in Buddhist thought, after illusion comes awakening. Do you think there will be a fifth chapter, and of what nature? And if DOKU were to survive you, what would you want him to continue doing in your absence?
First of all, from this question I feel that you have really studied my work. I admire the way you have posed it, because it does not simply ask whether DOKU will continue: it already touches the structure this series might need to face now. In a sense, I even have the feeling that you have guessed what I will do next, which surprised me. Yes, I have already begun preparing the fifth DOKU work, and it will be related to the “observer.” After illusion, for me, there does not immediately appear a fixed state that can simply be called “awakening.” Perhaps the more important question is: who is observing the illusion? Who is judging real and illusion? Who is waiting for awakening? If “DOKU The Illusion” allows the boundaries between real and illusion, waking and dream, physical and digital to begin collapsing, then the next step naturally turns toward the subject who still believes they are observing all of this. Not only is the world an illusion, the observer who looks at the illusion, analyzes the illusion, and even desires liberation from illusion must also be examined. The fifth chapter will therefore not be, perhaps, a new, more spectacular world, but a more inner and more insidious question: after all appearances have been seen as illusion, do we remain attached to an “I” that is observing the illusion? If the observer itself is unstable, where does awakening take place? As for DOKU possibly surviving me, I do not want to imagine it as a form of technological immortality. The question here is who experiences. If one day a person's consciousness, language, memory, face, and behavioral patterns could be copied by technology, I still would not think that the one who originally experienced has continued. It would be more like opening a new line of experience. The copied one may believe they have continued the original life; viewers may in turn believe that some continuity remains. For the one who originally experienced, however, the line of experience may have already broken. I therefore do not intend DOKU's future as “the continuation of Lu Yang.” If after my death DOKU continues to exist, to be looked at, generated, reinterpreted, it is not something I can control. I cannot even control my birth and death, karma, liberation: how could I control how a digital body will continue to change when I am no longer there? I still respect the original structure of samsara. However much technology advances, I do not believe it can truly break the laws of the universe. Technology may perhaps copy images, language, data, behavioral patterns, but it cannot transform death into a problem that can simply be technically erased. The most important thing about DOKU is therefore not that he continues to live in my place, but that he continues to expose the question itself: why are we so attached to preserving ourselves, to continuing to exist, to copying ourselves? If even the “I” is only a temporary assemblage of conditions, then what exactly is immortality trying to preserve?
