Lu Yang

The Great Adventure of the Material World Knight

The Great Adventure of the Material World Knight by Lu Yang is a video game world in which an androgynous protagonist goes on a hero’s journey to overcome their understanding of the material world as a coherent, objective truth. Looping arcade music builds suspense as the artist mobilizes varying aesthetics—Sinofuturist cityscapes, Kawaii, religious imagery, anime characters, and body scans of the artist—to propel the viewer through a series of levels, including heaven, hell, and various sites populated by deities and monsters. While traversing these worlds, the protagonist encounters a dizzying array of characters while posing a series of questions about the subjective nature of reality, desire, and suffering. The work draws an explicit link between the construction of video game worlds and the construction of reality by perceiving subjects, suggesting that liberation can be achieved by overcoming attachments to self and reality: in the game’s final level, the protagonist achieves this by destroying themself.