DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe is the first institutional solo exhibition in New York by Lu Yang, whose practice in 3D animation and video installation examines the limits of identity, consciousness, and embodiment in a digitized world.

The exhibition centers on DOKU, a virtual avatar modeled on the artist’s own body and face. Referencing the Japanese Buddhist phrase dokusho dokushi—“We are born alone, and we die alone”—DOKU serves as both a personal surrogate and philosophical vessel, navigating a cosmos where spiritual belief, neuroscience, and technological mediation converge.

DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe brings together three major, feature-length video works in Lu Yang’s ongoing DOKU cycle. In 306 Maujer, DOKU the Self (2022) and DOKU the Flow (2024) are displayed within a landscape installation that suggests a continuation of the garden just beyond the gallery’s walls. DOKU the Self follows Lu Yang’s avatar through states of drift and fragmentation: aboard a commercial flight, submerged in dreamlike memory, and reborn through cycles of reincarnation. DOKU the Flow expands this inquiry through the lens of Madhyamaka Buddhism, which posits that all phenomena are void of inherent essence. Embracing a nonlinear, recursive structure, the work resists narrative closure, underscoring the avatar’s movement not toward self-realization but toward the dissolution of the self as such.

In the adjacent black box theater, DOKU the Creator (2025) stages DOKU as artist and agent, interrogating the meaning of authorship in a virtual domain. What might compel a digital entity to create? What constitutes value or originality when the creator’s body itself is simulated? The film combines high-intensity visuals with a densely layered soundscape, offering a meditation on mythmaking in the age of artificial intelligence.

The exhibition’s subtitle, samsara.exe, treats reincarnation as a running, executable file—an endless system loop where identities load, dissolve, and reload. One of the visual elements in the work includes a code-like sequence that encapsulates this logic: “> ERROR_404: Self not found.” In programming terms, this suggests a failed attempt to call a function or retrieve a file labeled “self”—a reference point the system assumes must exist. But here, the system returns nothing: the “self” is a phantom variable, invoked repeatedly but never instantiated. Identity, in Lu Yang’s universe, is not lost; it was never operable in the first place.

Through dazzling animation and expansive conceptual frameworks, Lu Yang’s DOKU cycle challenges conventional understandings of subjectivity, proposing instead a model of being that is fractal, impermanent, and fundamentally unbound.