In Digital Descending, Yang’s first-ever solo exhibition, she brings together artworks from across her career, from her 2013 breakout Uterus Man about an asexual superhero who rides a skeletal pelvis chariot, to her 2019 work Delusional Crime and Punishment Wheel, where a goddess 3D prints human beings. Throughout her work, Lu moves – or digitally descends – through several avatars, almost all of which are genderless and modelled on the artist. This includes Doku, made entirely from a high-tech face scan of Lu’s own face. Described as the artist’s digital reincarnation, Doku can be spotted across Lu’s artworks – most notably, in 2015’s Delusion Mandala, where she stimulates her own death on repeat. A dancing Doku even features in The 1975’s music video for their track Playing On My Mind – a fitting cameo considering Lu’s explorations into brain and bodily functions.
Likening the process to a ghost in a shell, Lu uses digital technology to extend her soul beyond its corporal form and into various virtual selves – which are limitless and eternal. It’s by slipping in and out of these digital skins that Lu sets her body (or bodies) free from traditional western ideas of life and death, so that her soul can glide freely across both IRL and URL worlds, experience multiple embodied lives, and rebirth.