CURA.

The twelve nidānas describe dependent origination—the chain of causes that binds beings to samsara, the endless wheel of birth and death. In LuYang’s DOKU the Creator (2025), these links do not appear as tidy doctrine but as bleak, post-apocalyptic visions, conjured through grottos of piled bones, tormented bodies in purgatory, and ghostly remnants of technology in ruin. The illustrations of ignorance, formation, consciousness, name-and-form, and desire appear not as abstractions but as AI-generated phantasmagorias, terrifying in their intensity, unfolding in a hallucinatory cascade of hyper-saturated images that confront the viewer with the horrors of endless rebirth.

At the center stands DOKU, LuYang’s motion-captured avatar. Since 2018, LuYang has collaborated with scientists, 3D animators, and technicians to develop this morphing digital shell, named after the Buddhist aphorism Dokusho Dokushi, meaning “we are born alone, and we die alone.” Neither human nor machine, self nor other, DOKU embodies the Buddhist principle of non-self. Its body is hyperreal and yet perpetually virtual, shapeshifting in ways that resist any markers of fixed identity.

In this new iteration, DOKU becomes a creator but not in the modernist sense of invention ex nihilo. Instead, DOKU demonstrates that all forms are provisional: shapes and structures arise only through the temporary conjunction of countless conditions. By entrusting the act of creation to an algorithm, LuYang materializes the Buddhist idea that nothing arises independently but is conditioned by innumerable prior causes. The images are recombinant, drawn from vast archives of data.

The result is a digital sublime. The torrent of imagery overwhelms perception to the point of rupture, producing a sensory blackout that doubles as revelation. The visual world of DOKU the Creator resonates with a long art-historical lineage of cosmic catastrophe—from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Triumph of Death with its skeletal armies, to John Martin’s nineteenth-century apocalyptic panoramas, to Gustave Doré’s engravings of Dante’s Inferno. LuYang transforms such visions into a cybernetic delirium of crumbling architectures and skeletal figures hunched over ruinous computer terminals. The work also channels pulp science fiction, Moebius’s cosmic line-work, the psychedelic excess of 1970s album art, and the aesthetics of Japanese sci-fi anime.

Here, blackout becomes pedagogy. The viewer is confronted with phantasmagorias of the six realms of samsara so intense that perception falters, producing a visual excess that shocks them into awareness. At once teacher and disciple, transmitting and undergoing lessons in impermanence, DOKU guides the viewer through the twelve nidānas by plunging them into terrifying visions, revealing that the consolidation of self is the very mechanism that sets samsara in motion. To encounter DOKU is to enter the karmic engine directly, to experience samsara not as linear progression but as recursive suffering.

In ceding image-making to AI, LuYang stages a blackout of human agency. Authorship becomes unstable, diffused into the machine. This withholding of artistic control gestures toward the Buddhist doctrine of non-self, provoking the question: if the act of creation can be delegated to an algorithm, where, then, does selfhood truly reside?

This question extends LuYang’s long-standing inquiry into the instability of the self. Since Delusional Mandala (2015), when the artist first mapped emotions onto neural pathways using the schematic language of neurosurgery, LuYang has treated the self less as an essence than as a malleable circuitry. Later, in LuYang Delusional Crime and Punishment (2016), he placed digital avatars in grotesque hells, asking whether suffering requires a body if pain is processed by the nervous system. DOKU the Self (2022) pushed this further. Using his own facial data, LuYang generated six avatars, each inhabiting one of the six realms of samsara. These incarnations posed questions that echo Buddhist meditative inquiry: can the self be found in bones accumulated over countless rebirths? If a limb is lost, does part of the self disappear with it? By projecting and fracturing his likeness across avatars, LuYang both inhabited and relinquished the self.

In DOKU the Creator, the avatar becomes a vessel of pedagogy. It stages dependent origination as a theatre of illusions, showing how external markers of achievement, though powerful, are hollow constructs that reinforce the very consolidation of self that binds beings to samsara. By rendering these desires as spectral forces within the karmic cycle, the work suggests that what is often taken as the measure of life’s worth is in fact the fuel that keeps the wheel of suffering in motion.

Beyond the video, the artist produced twenty-four digital paintings in the form of playing cards, illustrating the Twelve Nidānas, the Six Realms, the Three Poisons, and the Karmic Paths of Buddhist philosophy. Avidyā (ignorance) is depicted as a man immobilized on a bed, wearing virtual-reality goggles, his hand reaching out as if to grasp the desirable. Behind him, a monitor flashes “ERROR” in neon, signaling the futility of his gesture. The vision of avidyā is a reminder that the material world itself is not dissimilar to the world seen through virtual reality. Ignorance here is staged as blackout—the collapse of perception into error, the faltering of awareness that initiates samsara. By representing ignorance as both a futile reach for desire and a systemic error, LuYang suggests that the first link in the chain of dependent origination is less a lack of knowledge than a misrecognition of appearances, a failure to see their impermanence and emptiness.

The exhibition DOKU the Creator – Bhavachakra at Société is staged as an immersive techno-spiritual theater. Silver ducts coil like cybernetic intestines across the gallery, while a central screen shows DOKU traversing realms of the Wheel of Life. Reflective surfaces and shimmering spheres extend the video outward, dissolving the boundary between digital and physical space. The viewer does not merely watch DOKU but is seemingly enfolded into its karmic circuitry, in a theater where illusion and revelation are inseparable.

For LuYang, this theater becomes the site where Buddhist cosmology and AI converge. The twelve nidānas, rendered in ecstatic montage, demonstrate that causality is not linear but recursive. AI functions not as a dream-maker but as a mirror of reality and illusion alike. DOKU, in turn, is what the artist calls a “mirror of emptiness” par excellence, free from the constraints of identity such as gender, nationality, and age.

As a godlike conjurer of visions, a skeletal reminder of mortality, and a bearer of the twelve nidānas, DOKU embodies both the mechanism of samsara and its potential rupture. LuYang describes the creative process as one of forgetting the self, allowing images to emerge of their own accord. The viewer, too, is drawn into this vortex of phantasmagoria, only to be startled awake within it. The exhibition thus functions not merely as spectacle but as ritual enactment, compelling us to recognize that the wheel turns not elsewhere but within us, spun by the very illusion of self to which we cling.