She Could Be a Cult Leader (II)
[ Part II ]
“‘In every primitive tribe,’ writes Dr. Géza Róheim, ‘we find the medicine man in the center of society and it is easy to show that the medicine man is either a neurotic or a psychotic or at least his art is based on the same mechanisms as a neurosis or a psychosis.’”
With the COVID-19 global pandemic, it is time for the world to rely on medicine like the primitive relied on their shaman. No matter the rich or the poor, the religious or the atheist, people in the modern day look to medicine when faced with the heaviest mental burdens of their life - bodily pain, pathology, and death. The hospital and the medical research lab rank the top of the realistic places that experience most life, deaths, and resurrections, apart from battlefields. Medicine is powerful; in front of medicine, humanity manifests its bizarre, absurd, and surreal aspects.
With contemporary sciences, Lu Yang’s works arouse the ancient fear as they investigate the ancient questions of matter, life, and mind, the duality of objective world and subjective world, the paradox of body and soul… Despite self-addressing as LuYang Asia, and filled with a hodgepodge of Asian subcultural signs, the works’ appeal are universal rather than provincial.
Lu Yang’s Delusional Crime and Punishment. Image from luyang.asia
Genderless, Gender Neutral, or a Boy?
In a scrutiny into the figures in Lu Yang’s works, we may find most of them gender ambiguous, but with exceptions. In “Lu Yang’s Delusional Crime and Punishment” (later shortened to “Crime and Punishment”), all the people are genderless replicas of Lu Yang. In “Electromagnetic Brainology,” the deities of elements water, earth, and air seem morphologically male and the deity of fire seems morphologically female, while their genders are not specified. In both cases, gender is not important in deciphering the artwork. The superpowers of the deities aren’t associated with one gender or another; all the figures in “Crime and Punishment” all together represent a unity of institutionalized human. They deliver a series of bold propositions - as Lu Yang describes on her website, for instance, who is the subject of torture, the carrier of pain, is it the body or the brain? If the pain is subjectively perceived by the brain, which is material, can technologies intervene in the Hell life and alleviate the subjective pain (excerpt translated by author from Lu Yang’s website)?
It is worth noting that “genderless” isn’t equal to “gender neutral.” The latter is more of a gender statement whose connotations relate to a whole conversation about gender, while the former simply discards any categorization and fails to construct a gender. In my coarse analogy, if traditional masculinity is the RGB color black (R-0 G-0 B-0), and traditional femininity is the RGB color white (R-255 G-255 B-255), then gender neutral is grey (R-127 G-127 B-127), whereas genderless is no fill.
In the artwork “Crime and Punishment,” gender is not only irrelevant but also misleading as a subliminal message. A subliminal message is a cue below the threshold of human’s conscious perception. You don’t consciously think about the gender, but the gender cues already slip into the back of your mind, persist adamantly, and interfere with your judgment of related issues.
Lu Yang, just as many artists and scholars, does not adopt the traditional male figure as the subject by default. Many challenge the myth of the male subject, even attempting to revert the patriarchy undertones by replacing the male subject with a universal female subject. But in my understanding, Lu Yang neither cares much about this complicated politics nor mixes her personal gender in everyday life in her artistic creations. Sometimes her subject is genderless, sometimes both male and female, sometimes gender neutral… You can find at least one example of each in her works.
Uterus Man, Lu Yang. Image from luyang.asia
In “Uterus Man,” Lu Yang creates a gender-ambivalent hero and names him Uterus Man. The name and the morphological appearance align with our mental category of heroes, as if Superman, Batman, Iron Man, and Uterus Man are four cartoon characters manufactured out of the same factory, the same production line. We couldn’t help but adhere a lot of characteristics to Uterus Man. All of this happens in the back of our unconsciousness. Through endowing Uterus Man with a masculine default setting and a set of feminine powers, such as the ovum light wave, Lu Yang juxtaposes and merges two contradictory identities onto one character.
In Lu Yang’s paintings, she sometimes clearly portrays herself as Pipimi, a girl character in Japanese digital manga Pop Team Epic.
In a recently ongoing project of Lu Yang, Dokushodokushi, she transforms into a male self digitally. Using facial tracking technology, she reincarnates her own face with high fidelity; she uses a male dancer’s body and finger motion tracking as reference for this character’s dance moves. On Instagram, the artist explicitly addressed the digital person with “him” in a comment reply to her fan.
An already published still image from ongoing project Dokushodokushi. By Lu Yang.
Digital reincarnation technologies. LuYang BMW Art Journey Project - Part 1 - Behind the Scenes.
Body motion capture using Xsens and Manus. LuYang BMW Art Journey Project - Part 1 - Behind the Scenes
The digital reincarnation, Doku, appears gender neutral. More is coming, as the artist promises, there are more to expect. At least we know, genderless-ness or gender neutrality isn’t any tenet that Lu Yang adheres to. The gender of her work depends on the message of the work, sometimes contradictory, sometimes completely irrelevant, and it must be understood case by case.
Lu Yang once mentioned in a description at her 2018 exhibition “Encephalon Heaven” at M. Woods that she admires Mao Sugiyama. The latter is a Japanese artist known for deleting his biological gender by performing some surgeries. It is therefore a speculation that the gender erasure and gender alteration found in Lu Yang’s works can be traced to the influence by Sugiyama. But Lu Yang’s research interests in neuroscience transcends her gender interrogation to multiple levels. As she always interrogates where the immaterial lies, she might as well be interested in where true gender lies - the level of body, the level of DNA, the level of brain?
Lu Yang Delusional Mandala. The Chinese character in the center reads “brain.” Image from luyang.asia
The Supernatural, Fantasy, and Neurology
Modern medicine can realize a lot of ancient visions that border on supernatural powers. For instance, resurrection of the dead, like that in Frankenstein, can be achieved administering electric shocks to dead animals. When Lu Yang choreographed a dance by an array of incomplete frog remains left from a medical experiment, we see that the most poetic is no more than science itself, the most exciting no more than everyday life.
To be continued