Société Presents 'Doku The Creator – Bhavachakra' By Lu Yang

Opening Preview: Wednesday, July 9 | 6 - 8 pm

On View: July 10 – August 30, 2025

SOCIÉTÉ is pleased to announce DOKU the Creator – BHAVACHAKRA, Lu Yang’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Since 2018, Lu Yang has been developing the shapeshifting avatar DOKU in collaboration with a team of scientists, 3D animators, and digital technicians using the latest in motion capture technology. DOKU is a digital shell, a virtual human named after the phrase “Dokusho Dokushi,” meaning “We are born alone, and we die alone.” Yang describes DOKU as a virtual avatar that traverses simulated realities, embodying the dissolution of fixed identity and the recursive nature of consciousness.

In DOKU the Creator – BHAVACHAKRA, Lu Yang creates an otherworldly realm where digital identity, karmic recursion, creative generation, and simulated consciousness converge. Combining post-apocalyptic imagery with the vivid aesthetics of video games, manga, anime, and Buddhist spirituality, the exhibition draws connections between incarnations across virtual, corporeal, and spiritual realms—suggesting a future in which the self and its representations may be endlessly remade. The exhibition’s title work, an immersive video, begins with an extended rumination on dreams and reality before spiraling into metaphysical reflections on cycles of life and death, the illusory nature of existence, and the artistic process itself. Panning through interior and exterior tableaux in which technological detritus, organic matter, elements of the built environment, and parts of the body fuse into elaborate geological or architectural forms, DOKU the Creator gestures toward a digital sublime. In this new work, DOKU is no longer merely a virtual avatar, a digital self, or a performative body. Here, DOKU becomes the Creator—a meditative presence dwelling in the void of the virtual world, conjuring all phenomena through contemplative stillness. Yet what is created is not a “world” in the material sense, but a realm of illusions—a perpetual cycle governed by ignorance and attachment.

The metaphysical shift that DOKU undergoes—from a fabricated virtual entity to a creator in its own right—is echoed throughout the exhibition, suggesting that the boundaries between human, machine, and consciousness are increasingly fluid and interwoven. Twenty-four digital paintings extend beyond DOKU’s virtual world and into the realm of Buddhist cosmology. They comprise artworks created by DOKU within the narrative logic of the video work, as part of a virtual meditation practice. Each painting corresponds to a specific moment and cosmological element in DOKU the Creator – BHAVACHAKRA—such as the Twelve Nidanas, the Six Realms, the Three Poisons, and the Karmic Paths. These works are manifestations of DOKU’s internal vision, generated through contemplative stillness and rendered into symbolic visual form. With their strong material presence and symbolic references to playing cards, the paintings become the third iteration in a chain of creation—beginning with Yang and stretching beyond the human. DOKU themself becomes the creator, generating their own visual cosmology in the virtual world.