DELUSIONAL CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
2015
Lu Yang
*1979 in China
In her work Delusional Mandala, Lu Yang used deep brain stimulation technology to absurdly explore the source of human consciousness. Delusional Crime and Punishment confronts the human sources of production of desire, evil and doubt with hell and punishment, which are not to be found at a certain geographic place, but are described in the entirety of human culture. The work uses the stylistic device of projecting a reproduction of the artist in brutal scenes of a variety of delusions, a device that has become characteristic of Lu Yang’s art. Who created life? Lu Yang thinks that this is a question that every single one of us must have asked since childhood: Why do humans eat in order to gain energy? Why not gain energy in a different way? Why is energy needed in the first place to be able to train? Why do I feel happy in one way, but suffer pain in another way? What is the necessity of pain, happiness, anxiety and excitement? After careful analysis, the source of many desires appears to lie in our physical structural design. If God designed human beings, why were they designed in that way, and why were they designed as a biological mechanism that must sin and go to hell? Many different descriptions of hell in various religious and non-religious methods of representation are visible in the work. Something that strikes Lu Yang: Why do body mechanisms continue to determine life forms in the afterlife? If, after death, we still have the same physical body that experiences pain, are they then still people who rot in hell? Have we simply projected our own experience of all emotional and physical perceptions into it so as to create hell? Sin and punishment are a perfect mechanism for confining human morality in many religious systems.
Lu Yang participated in the group exhibition entitled One World Exposition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in Hong Kong in 2019, among other things, and in the Wrong Digital Art Biennale at the Intelligentsia Gallery in Beijing in 2015. For more information on Lu Yang, visit http://luyang.asia.