From 3D simulations of neurosurgical procedures to video-game avatars for gods of pain, Lu Yang’s eye-searing, pop-culture-inflected multimedia projects are products of the artist’s longstanding research into the nexus of the material and the metaphysical. Lu’s half-hour video-performance Delusional World (2020), livestreamed from the Chronus Art Centre in Shanghai to a custom website hosted by ACMI Melbourne, is a disco inferno that unleashes the horror and ecstasy of radical self-creation.

Fitted with motion-capture harnesses and mirrored shades, dancer Qin Ran controls a motley crew of grotesque 3D-modeled characters, starting with a naked, headless figure whose stocky torso bears the artist’s contorted, grinning face. The mutant mimics the dancer’s choreography to an electronic soundtrack by GameFace as Lu, stationed at a computer off-camera, pans across an animated black-and-white checkerboard floor decorated with iridescent plants and levitating body parts. Qin doesn’t skip a beat as Lu seamlessly toggles between landscapes, perspectives, and avatars in real time, propelling the audience in a freewheeling trip across many cosmological hellscapes, including a loopy fairground and a blood-drenched Gehenna. This journey echoes the pan-theological idea of the underworld as comprising numerous circles, described in Dante’s Inferno as well as Buddhist, Daoist, and Hindu traditions.

Delusional World exemplifies Lu’s madcap remixing of religious iconography with horror and manga tropes—a chaotically maximalist approach that simultaneously captures the internet’s sensory excess and the infinite configurability of virtual objects. In Lu’s video-game inferno, it is entirely plausible for a deformed Hatsune Miku avatar to transform into a Kali-inspired goddess, for zany anime aesthetics to collide with the high-octane violence of giallo horror. At the final stage, Qin—now a gilded deity crowned with spinning heads— stumbles to a halt like a powered-down machine, as if the dancer, too, is merely a programmable shell, given over to rapture and oblivion.