Lu Yang’s ongoing DOKU trilogy of video works (2018–2025) explores the dissolution of selfhood in relation to digital, biological, and spiritual systems. Across DOKU: Digital Alaya (2021), DOKU: the Self (2022), and DOKU: the Flow (2024), the Shanghai and Tokyo-based artist employs video game aesthetics, motion-capture technology, and Buddhist philosophy to interrogate where identity resides when consciousness can be rendered, replicated, and endlessly reborn. Throughout the trilogy an avatar based on the artist’s own likeness is seen to experience or inhabit various realities, ranging from mundane to the utterly fantastic. Inspired by ideas from Yogācāra Buddhism—particularly the concept of ālayavijñāna or “storehouse consciousness”—Lu Yang pictures DOKU not as a stable character but as a flickering assemblage of data, neurons, and spiritual concepts. Altogether, the trilogy asks whether the self, once decomposed into genetic code, brain activity, and algorithmic behavior, can be said to exist at all, or whether it persists only as impermanent patterns cycling through biological and digital networks.
Lu Yang's DOKU trilogy relates to Vienna Digital Cultures’ 2026 theme “Alone or Together?” in an unexpected way. Where the festival asks what forms of togetherness or individuality are possible under digital mediation, Lu Yang asks something more fundamental: whether the individual doing the connecting or withdrawing is coherent in the first place. If the self is not a stable entity but a flickering assemblage of data, neurons, and karmic residue, then the opposition between solitude and togetherness begins to dissolve at its foundation—you cannot be alone, or together, if there is no fixed “you” to begin with.
Here, Buddhist philosophy and digital culture converge with surprising force: The concept of ālayavijñāna—a storehouse consciousness that accumulates impressions across lifetimes without constituting a fixed soul—offers a pre-modern framework that feels newly legible in an age of persistent data trails, behavioral profiling, and digital afterlives. The DOKU avatar, modelled on the artist’s own likeness yet untethered from any singular body or moment, embodies the condition the festival sets out to examine: circulating continuously, visible yet elusive, present without being locatable. In this sense, THE DOKU TRILOGY suggests that what technology has made newly strange, certain philosophical traditions may have understood all along.
Lu Yang (*1984, Shanghai) 3D animations and installations explore fundamental questions of the body and consciousness, spirituality and science, and the limits of being human. Yang frequently uses their own body as a digital alter ego, subjecting it to virtual experiments in which it is multiplied, dissected, or transformed. Yang gained international recognition through presentations at the Biennale di Venezia, Times Square Arts (NYC), Julia Stoschek Foundation (Düsseldorf), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Louis Vuitton (Paris), the New Museum (NYC), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Kunsthalle Basel, Fridericianum (Kassel) and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing), among others, and is part of major international collections. In 2022, Lu Yang was named “Artist of the Year” by Deutsche Bank.
Vienna Digital Cultures
Lu Yang: The DOKU Trilogy is presented as part of the festival Vienna Digital Cultures 2026, which explores the cultural impacts of digital technologies under the theme “Alone or Together?”. VDC 2026 is curated by Nadim Samman.
Vienna Digital Cultures is organized on a rotating basis by FOTO ARSENAL WIEN and Kunsthalle Wien and has taken place annually since 2025.
