LU YANG
Lu Yang’s professional life unfolds almost exclusively in the digital realm, where, for over a decade, he has been creating vivid animations and computer games. Populating these cyberspaces are eccentric characters influenced by Japanese anime, Hindu polytheism, and various subcultures, who flit between deadpan violence and understated humor as they engage in battles, and, at times, dance-offs. Yet, every interstitial spaceship has a dock, so to speak; in November, I met with Lu in his Shanghai studio—the beating heart of his virtual universe.
Lu’s studio is also his apartment where he lives with his husband, the performance artist, dramaturge, and director Chen Tianzhou, whose own artistic activities, produced partly under the theatrical collective Asian Dope Boys, are a hybrid mashup of absurdist dramas and techno raves. Their duplex is in a 1960s residential block located 15 minutes by taxi
