Reshaping posthuman subjectivity: Lu Yang’s representation of virtual bodies in the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

With the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, much of the world has been experiencing isolation and quarantine. Digital technology, especially the internet, has become the essential method of communication when social distancing measures constrain physical contact. The global health crisis leads to a dynamically increasing reliance on digital equipment contributing to a posthuman world. The article will take Shanghai-based multimedia artist Lu Yang (1984‐) as a representative example to explore an alternative posthumanism subjectivity in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Built theoretically on Kathrine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism concepts of virtual bodies, this article will examine how Lu Yang’s work articulates the interactive relationships between humans and the material world to go beyond the conservative corporeality and contribute to a renewal of posthuman subjectivity. In Lu Yang’s recent projects created during the pandemic, such as Doku × The 1975 ‘Playing on My Mind’ (2020) and the live-streamed piece Delusional World (2020), the artist experiments with different strategies to break down social-cultural constraints and transcend established dualisms of gender binaries, life and death, human and non-human. With a close investigation of Lu Yang’s multidisciplinary artistic practices, this article intends to argue how a new subjectivity emerges in contemporary Chinese art and its roles in the current COVID-19 pandemic world.

Morphological Fantasies: Posthuman Embodiment in Tian Xiaolei’s Video Art

“…Artists from the mainland such as Lu Yang (Shanghai), Yiyun Chen (Shanghai), Chen Guo (Shanghai), as well as Taiwan-based artists Pei-ying Lin, Paul Gong, and Kuang-yi Ku are equally prominent figures who have been working extensively at the intersection of art, life sciences, biology, religion, and so on. The intermingling of human body and the technology, the issue of posthuman subjectivity, as well as the relation between Buddhism and technology also lie at the heart of some of their works, especially Lu Yang's artistic videos (Gao, 2021). Focusing on Tian's videos, this essay aims to present an exemplary case of a larger artist and cultural landscape that is yet to be explored in a hyper-technological contemporary Chinese society.…”

Lu Yang

“…It constitutes the first major academic study exclusively dedicated to the artist. Recent scholarship on Lu Yang has focused on the following topics: post-internet/post-digital art (Kim 2017(Kim , 2019, feminism and posthumanism (Braidotti 2022;Guo 2020), queer Sinofuturism (Remy-Handfield 2020), and posthuman identity in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (Gao 2021). More recently, Rosi Braidotti places Lu Yang's work in dialogue with post human feminism and sexuality in Post-Human Feminism (2022).…”