The Great Adventure of the Material World Knight
2021 - Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)
25:00 minutes
Lu Yang
The Great Adventure of the Material World Knight by Lu Yang is a video game world in which an androgynous protagonist goes on a hero’s journey to overcome their understanding of the material world as a coherent, objective truth. Looping arcade music builds suspense as the artist mobilizes varying aesthetics—Sinofuturist cityscapes, Kawaii, religious imagery, anime characters, and body scans of the artist—to propel the viewer through a series of levels, including heaven, hell, and various sites populated by deities and monsters. While traversing these worlds, the protagonist encounters a dizzying array of characters while posing a series of questions about the subjective nature of reality, desire, and suffering. The work draws an explicit link between the construction of video game worlds and the construction of reality by perceiving subjects, suggesting that liberation can be achieved by overcoming attachments to self and reality: in the game’s final level, the protagonist achieves this by destroying themself.
Through an aesthetic steeped in manga and Final Fantasy, Lu Yang’s work uses the rubric of role-playing video games to model the possibility of liberation from repressive gender roles and societal norms, given compelling form through kinetic action and AAA-level video game graphics. However, the dream of liberation that Lu crafts is often complicated by images of physical anguish and an ongoing theme of cognitive manipulation, drawing on ideas and imagery from Hinduism and Buddhism (religions that place great philosophical emphasis on understanding mental projection and illusion) and neuroscience, particularly the study of stimulation and manipulation of the cerebral cortex. Lu’s work offers a unique and compelling investigation of metaphysical and embodied aspects of virtuality.
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