• 16 Nov, 2025 *

I first encountered Lu Yang’s work in 2023 at the Hirshhorn museum in Washington, DC. “A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China” was an exhibit of 25 artists, and featured Lu Yang’s work DOKU the Self: a 36-minute video piece in which the artist’s androgynous avatar traverses the six paths of Buddhism and experiences a transcendent breakdown of the self. It’s colorful, maximalist, and hypnotic, drawing from video games and dance music and sci-fi aesthetics, while its narrated concept is rooted in Buddhist thought. I sat in the museum and watched the whole thing, transfixed.

A year later, I sought out the second video in the series, DOKU the Flow, at the Rubin museum before its 2024 closure. Lu Yang’s blend of ancient ideas and poppy, commercially-inspired mediums inspires and excites me, and feels particularly reflective of the world I move through. So, when I was in New York for the second annual Gathering of the Ghosts ghostwriting conference, I carved out an afternoon to see the third video in the series, DOKU the Creator, at Amant Gallery in Brooklyn as part of the exhibition DOKU! DOKU! DOKU! samsara.exe.

Like last year, a significant portion of the conference panels were devoted to AI–a topic that doesn’t exactly light me up with excitement. I’d read that Lu Yang had used AI tools in DOKU the Creator; typically, that was a craft decision that’d turn me off. But if there’s any artist who could implement AI for a larger statement about art, creation, and our current world, it’s Lu Yang. I figured even if I didn’t like the piece, it’d at least deepen my engagement with the conference panels the next day. (“Sure, I know about Perplexity, but have you seen this artist...”)

The AI use in DOKU the Creator is obvious (I assume intentionally so). DOKU–the protagonist avatar to whom I feel, at this point, connected–dances in beautiful, hypnotic interludes between AI slop landscapes. The sequences are pointlessly surreal, with so much detail the eye doesn’t know where to look. Wherever I did look, I saw the slop-details that define AI visuals: misspelled words, the wrong number of arms, a mildly deformed face. An MRI machine absorbed in muscle tissue while a crowd of unspecified doctors look on. A giant three-armed robot poking, slow-motion, at a spherical machine with an eyeball. I’ve already forgotten the specifics of the others, but I’d describe them all as “Midjourney does HR Giger.”

In one (mostly not AI) sequence, DOKU sits in a barren valley at a table of blocks. The narration questions what it means to create at all, recognizing creation as not making something from nothing, but remaking what has already been made into new forms, and the impossibility of making anything truly new at all. DOKU the Creator is about the avatar itself creating. Lu Yang disappears and allows their digital version to create through the digital arm of AI as a means of interrogating consciousness. The exercise put a wall up between the artist and me, where previous DOKU works have not. And as an immersive video experience, the AI just straight up looks bad.

At the Gathering of the Ghosts, one panelist referred to resistance to AI tools as a “Luddite” reaction, similar to writerly resistance to word processors and the internet. I don’t think it’s that simple. Integration of AI into life is new potential point of stratification and division. Those who make AI tools are currently getting obscenely rich and propping up our entire economy despite not being profitable. Those who use AI, like some of the writers at this conference, claim to be more productive and making more money. Still others are chatting their way to killing themselves.

I already position myself as a human creator. I don’t integrate AI into my work because I haven’t uncovered a use case for it. Commonly AI-assisted tasks, like research, outlining, brainstorming, and title generation, are all things I like to do. Why offload it if I like it? A lack of AI assistance reveals not a Luddite rejection but an abundance of time, attention, and even pleasure. I have time to dig, time to experiment, and time to create something unique and surprising. Time is a privilege. I can imagine AI non-use becoming a class signifier, like screen time limitations. In the same way long-term disconnection from a smartphone can be a privilege if you have the resources to navigate around the inconveniences and consequences, AI avoidance could signal both time and agency: you don’t need to use AI because you have enough time and freedom to not use it.

In DOKU the Creator, I recognized the slop scenes as hallucinatory filler. Lu Yang has been remarkably prolific, with dozens of shows worldwide and multiple long video works. With such pressure to produce, it makes sense that they are curious about building a digital self that can create autonomously. I was exhausted watching it. It gave me the familiar sense of being “overscreened”: when I’ve spent too much time on my phone and the barrage of stimuli has made me tired and stupid, like a mini concussion.

I stepped out of the black box theater and into the anteroom, in which a small garden of cairns surrounded the screen showing DOKU the Self. The piece was in its ANIMAL sequence. We sweep down a hallway lined with butchered pigs to find DOKU, dressed in candy-colored rave gear, dancing in a sterile white lab; they’re surrounded by animals ambling on treadmills on a lethargic trip to nowhere in a simultaneously ominous and playful depiction of the natural world. “Wait,” I told my friend, pausing and turning toward the screen, “I love this one.”