Lu Yang
DOKU – The Creator

2025
Single-channel video, colour, sound, 4K, 16:9, stereo
Chinese with English subtitles
61 min. 35 s.
Created by: Lu Yang
AI visual generation by: DOKU
Music by: DOKU
Sound effects: Woody Du
Motion capture (Indian classical dance): Maanasa Sri Ganesh
Motion capture (contemporary dance): Naoyuki Sakai
Courtesy of the artist

DOKU, Lu Yang’s virtual avatar, moves through simulated realities. Named after the Japanese phrase dokusho dokushi—“We are born alone, and we die alone”—DOKU traverses virtual, corporeal and spiritual realms, transitioning from one incarnation of the avatar to the next.

DOKU – The Creator marks the first time DOKU appears in the role of a creator. In the film, the act of creation is an ontological gesture, one that stages relationships between concepts and transforms the Buddhist notion of śūnyatā or emptiness into form. The film opens with DOKU meditating on dreams and reality before turning to metaphysical reflections on karmic cycles, illusions of life and the creative process. Generative AI is used to conjure countless visual universes, algorithmic landscapes, built environments and bodily forms, blurring boundaries between human and machine and evoking a digital sublime. In the previous chapter of the DOKU video series, DOKU –The Self (2022), the digital avatar was introduced as a vessel through which reincarnation and identity was explored. In this most recent chapter, the focus shifts outward: the virtual character is no longer only subject but also agent, moving from introspection to world-building, and from the search for selfhood to the generative force of creation itself. 

Lu Yang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tokyo and Shanghai whose practice integrates advanced digital technology, Buddhist philosophy and future-oriented cultural thought. Centring the virtual avatar ‘DOKU’, Lu Yang creates immersive worlds using computer-generated imagery, game engines and motion capture technology. Within these environments, he explores the boundaries of consciousness, the illusory nature of identity, and the fictionality of life and death. Rooted in the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy, Lu Yang’s work constructs a highly sensorial visual language that invites audiences to rethink the relationship between perception and reality in the digital age.

DOKU – The Creator is presented as part of the year-long film programme How to Reappear, curated by Indranjan Banerjee. 

How to Reappear presents a series of films that  explore what it means to be remade, to survive and to persist in altered forms. The works draw viewers into intimate encounters with transition and transformation, revealing the intensity and tenderness of these processes as well as their moments of shock and disorientation. In these stories, flesh, terrains and topographies become sites where transformation unfolds. They underscore the fragility of bodies and landscapes as myth, illusion and virtuality shape how change is imagined and endured.