EVENT: LU YANG, DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!:SAMSARA.EXE (SEPTEMBER 18 2025–FEBRAURY 15 2026, NEW YORK)
Amant’s autumn programme gives Lu Yang a New York institutional solo framed explicitly around iteration: birth, death, reload. DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe runs in Brooklyn from 18 September 2025 to 15 February 2026, unfolding across Amant’s spaces at 306 Maujer Street.
The exhibition centres on DOKU, a digital double modelled on Lu Yang’s body and face. Amant ties the name to the phrase dokusho dokushi (“we are born alone, and we die alone”), sharpening the show’s basic wager: if subjectivity is experienced as solitary, then the avatar becomes less a character than a test environment for that solitude.
Amant presents three feature-length videos from the ongoing DOKU cycle: DOKU the Self (2022), DOKU the Flow (2024), and DOKU the Creator (2025). Rather than treating these as a linear trilogy, the installation splits them into distinct conditions of viewership.
In the 306 Maujer gallery, DOKU the Self and DOKU the Flow appear within a landscape intervention that extends the venue’s garden logic indoors, an architectural cue that matters for how the films land. The garden reference is not decorative; it positions DOKU’s transformations as ambient weather rather than plot. Amant’s summary of DOKU the Self emphasises drift and fragmentation, air travel, submerged memory, reincarnation cycles: images that read like the “loading screens” of interiority, where the self is repeatedly buffered and reconstituted.
DOKU the Flow pushes that instability into a doctrinal register. Amant explicitly names Madhyamaka Buddhism and its claim that phenomena lack inherent essence. For viewers coming from game-art and engine culture, this is where the exhibition’s metaphor does real work: the avatar is not a stable entity with attributes, but a contingent output, dependent on rigs, pipelines, shaders, capture sessions, render farms, and the interpretive habits of audiences trained to look for “a character” behind the image.
Then, in an adjacent black box theatre, DOKU the Creator moves from ontology to production, without pretending those domains can be cleanly separated. Amant frames the film as an inquiry into authorship and value under simulated embodiment.
The subtitle is more than a clever file extension. Amant describes samsara.exe as reincarnation imagined as a running program: an endless loop of identity loading, dissolving, and reloading. The show’s emblematic text string, “ERROR_404: Self not found”, is doing double duty: it borrows the vernacular of web failure while also naming a philosophical dead-end. The system calls for a “self” because that is how systems are typically written, variables assumed to exist. The return value is null.
There is a risk here. Error metaphors can flatten complex philosophical traditions into familiar techno-slang, inviting the audience to feel they have “got it” too quickly. Yet Lu Yang’s best moments do not hinge on the joke; they hinge on fatigue and repetition. The longer one remains with these images, the more the work refuses the consolations that galleries often offer when they import spiritual language: no tranquil transcendence, no therapeutic wholeness, no polished “journey” arc. Instead, the show insists on recurrence as a condition of both belief and computation: the loop is not a narrative device; it is infrastructure.
DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe reads as a serious proposition about what “a self” looks like after pipelines. DOKU is not simply a virtual body; it is a managed asset that foregrounds how identity is assembled across tools and collaborators, then presented back to us as if it were innate. That tension is amplified by the exhibition’s spatial design – garden-like continuity in one area, black-box concentration in another – making spectatorship oscillate between immersion and audit.
The timing also matters. Amant notes that the exhibition coincides with Museum of the Moving Image’s presentation of The Great Adventure of Material World (2019–2020), including an interactive “game film” version that visitors can experience as gameplay. Seen together, these projects clarify how Lu Yang approaches game aesthetics: not as decorative “gaming references”, but as a set of logics (trial, repetition, transformation) through which spiritual cosmology and computational design can be made to rub against each other.
Works featured
DOKU The Self, 2022
Single-channel 4K video, 36:00 min.
Music composer & producer: liiii (Li Xin)
Sound effects & mastering: Woody Du (Du Jiaxuan)
Trumpet & flugelhorn: Feng (Feng Yucheng)
Narration: Takano Shinya
DOKU The Flow, 2024
Single-channel 4K video, 50:15 min.
Concept, writing & performance: Lu Yang
Director & art direction: Lu Yang
Music composer & producer: liiii (Li Xin)
Sound effects & mastering: Woody Du (Du Jiaxuan)
Morin khuur: Duren
Trumpet & flugelhorn: Feng (Feng Yucheng)
Narration: Takano Shinya
Special thanks and tributes to:
Dzogchen Pema Kalsang Rinpoche
Dzogchen Qiulin Gega Rinpoche
Dzogchen Pema Tashi Rinpoche
DOKU The Creator, 2025
Single-channel 4K video, 61:35 min.
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