In video games, you can be whoever you want to be. By day, you might be Tim from accounts, but once you get home, you’re an ancient assassin, a Norse god, an orc or an elite Marine. You can create an avatar, you can choose a new body, a new nose, a new gender. Chinese artist LuYang uses those ideas of bodily and spiritual freedom to explore themes of life, death, Buddhism and philosophy, all through the hyper-intense lens of anime, sci fi and gaming. The main video finds the artist’s avatar Doku moving through various states of perception and existence, flying over hills covered with the ex-bodies of the reincarnated, dancing in hell, floating in space, their body crystallising and exploding into nothingness. A voice questions the meaning of the self, the body, of good and bad, physical and immaterial. LuYang is forcing you to consider your body, your selfhood, how you’ve lived, how you’ll die. It’s brilliant, complex, powerful, over the top, a bit silly, and genuinely moving. All around it are videos of Doku as heaven and hell engaged in a very po-faced but also very funny dance battle, creating a new god in the process, Other videos find LuYang’s avatars brandishing severed heads, dancing covered in skulls, shooting lasers out of their bodies, rendered in crisp, eye-searing, psychedelic, HD, video game perfection. It’s all LuYang using the aesthetics and language of anime and gaming to explore life and death. It’s an overwhelming sensory environment. But the backroom has
Don't let your cash flow, or lack of it, get in the way of having a banging weekend. Read our guide to free things to do in London this weekend and you can make sure that your Friday, Saturday and Sunday go off with a bang, without eating up your bucks. After all, the best things in life are free.
If that's whetted your appetite for events and cultural happenings in London, get planning further ahead by having a gander over our events calendar.
RECOMMENDED: Save even more dosh by taking a look at our guide to cheap London.