Material Wonderland
A Lu Yang Solo Exhibition

Material Wonderland was the first exhibition of NFT works by Chinese multimedia artist Lu Yang, presented at Vellum LA and online on Feral File. It was co-curated by Alice Scope, curator at Vellum LA, and Barry Threw, Executive and Artistic Director of the San Francisco cultural incubator Gray Area.

The presentation arrived as shared online spaces increasingly condition how we define our own modes of being. The avatars, actions, and settings in Material Wonderland point to the transformative potential of video games as sites of enactment and exploration, and to the role of artists in anticipating cultural traumas and imagining expansive responses. Resisting the view of virtual worlds as escapism, the work presents an open narrative as a transcendental technology of the self, a toolkit for reconstructing identity back in the physical world.

The exhibition included eight new NFT works, a first for the artist, minted on Ethereum with Feral File. Also shown were two full-length video works exploring the game world, and the video triptych Material World Knight, first shown at the 2018 Shanghai Biennale and presented on a 600 square foot panoramic LED wall for the opening night.

The NFT works are video loops rendered from within Lu Yang's 2019 computer game The Great Adventure of Material World. The game begins as a standard Japanese anime role-playing game, in which players embody the Material World Knight, completing quests and battling enemies alongside characters from the artist's earlier works. Over ten stages, players undergo multiple identity transformations, moving beyond the tropes of manga culture to explore identity freed from the confines of nationality, gender, and sexuality.

The opening was attended by the artist, with a DJ set by Philip Lai, co-founder of STRRR.tv.

About Lu Yang

Lu Yang creates fantastical, often painful and shocking images that blend religion, philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and technology, alluding to natural and religious forms. Their practice spans game engines, 3D animation, video game installations, holograms, motion capture performance, virtual reality, and software manipulation, often in collaboration with scientists, psychologists, performers, dancers, composers, producers, robotics companies, and pop stars.

Lu Yang holds a BA and MA from the New Media Art department of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Basel (2023), Zabludowicz Collection, London (2022-23), Palais Populaire, Berlin (2022-23), ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (2021-22), Spiral, Tokyo (2018), M WOODS, Beijing (2017-18), MOCA Cleveland (2017), UCCA, Beijing (2011), and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (2011). Group exhibitions include The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), the Asia Society Triennial (2021), Centre Pompidou (2020), the Shanghai Biennale (2018, 2012), the Athens Biennale (2018), the Liverpool Biennial (2016), and the 56th Venice Biennale, Chinese Pavilion (2015). Lu Yang received the BMW Art Journey in 2019 and was named Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year in 2022.