How video games became a new playground for artists

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Born in Shanghai in 1984 and based in Tokyo, LuYang is part of a generation of artists who grew up on a diet of video games and now deconstruct their themes and repurpose their visual language. They show how games are expanding the horizons of fine art, not just in subject matter but also by providing new tools that radically increase the scope and scale of what a single artist can create.  The exhibition centres around LuYang’s half-hour animated film DOKU the Self, which premiered at this year’s Venice Biennale and explores existential questions around reincarnation and the nature of consciousness. Its multiple characters and high-fidelity dance sequences might have taken millions of dollars and a huge team to produce 20 years ago, but can now be made by a single artist with a modest budget using game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine.  All artists are world-builders in a sense, creating their own aesthetic universes with characters, forms and concerns that recur across their work, but these tools allow digital assets to be generated, manipulated and reused with minimum fuss. Other artists using similar techniques include Lawrence Lek, whose game-like films are driven by sci-fi narratives exploring the future of technology in China, and Ian Cheng, whose work interrogating AI has been shown at MoMA and the Whitney in New York.