Berlin Art Week returns in September, and one of its most unexpected encounters will unfold inside a historic hospital building. At DRK Kliniken Berlin Westend, multimedia artist LuYang will present LU YANG | DOKU: TRIAGE, a site-specific installation created for the institution’s historic Kochhaus. Running from September 12–20, the project places LuYang’s expansive digital universe in direct conversation with a setting shaped by questions of the body, vulnerability, and care.
Presented by DRK Kliniken Berlin Westend and KUNST IM WESTEND e.V., the exhibition forms part of Berlin Art Week 2026. Its location is integral to the work. For LuYang, hospitals carry a deeply personal resonance, recalling childhood experiences of spending nights in emergency rooms and encountering illness, death, and the precariousness of the human body from an early age.
DOKU Meets the Kochhaus
Kochhaus der DRK Kliniken Berlin Westend, photo by Andrea Katheder.
Inside the Kochhaus, hospital beds will be arranged throughout the main hall, while large banners descend from above. The installation draws on imagery from DOKU The Self (2022) and DOKU The Flow (2024), two films centered on LuYang’s genderless digital avatar, DOKU. Together, they introduce a language of transformation and impermanence into a physical environment where those themes already have an unmistakable presence.
The title DOKU: TRIAGE evokes the clinical act of assessing bodies according to urgency, while LuYang’s work considers the body as something far less fixed. Across the DOKU universe, identity can fracture, multiply, dissolve, and reappear.
Six Incarnations
Lu Yang, “Doku the Flow,” Courtesy the artist and Société Berlin.
The adjoining rooms of the Kochhaus will extend the installation through lightboxes featuring six digital versions of DOKU: Animal, Asura, Heaven, Hell, Human, and Hungry Ghost. Inspired by Buddhist and Hindu cosmologies, the figures correspond to the six realms explored in DOKU The Self, where DOKU moves through different states of existence while questioning the stability of body, identity, and consciousness.
In DOKU The Flow, that journey continues after the avatar’s body breaks apart into glass-like fragments. Reassembled and sent back toward earth, DOKU moves through shifting digital forms, with the Buddhist philosophy of Madhyamaka informing the film’s meditation on emptiness and the absence of a fixed essence.
Between the Physical and Digital
“DOKU the Self,” Still, Lu Yang, “DOKU the Self,” Courtesy the artist and Société Berlin.
The project offers a fitting introduction to LuYang’s wider practice, where science, spirituality, neuroscience, gaming, anime, science fiction, and digital culture intersect. At its center is DOKU, which the artist describes as a digital extension of the self, a virtual shell that allows physical and digital identities to continually overlap.
Dance also plays an important role in this evolving vocabulary, giving movement to an identity that refuses to remain stable. LuYang’s collaborations across disciplines—including with neuroscientists, psychologists, musicians, software developers, traditional dancers, and robotics companies—further reflect the breadth of questions embedded in the work.
A Different Kind of Art-Week Encounter
Lu Yang, “Doku the Flow,” Courtesy the artist and Société Berlin.
During the dynamic Berlin Art Week, DOKU: TRIAGE offers an experience that unfurls beyond the conventional gallery or fair environment. The Kochhaus becomes part of the artwork’s meaning, bringing LuYang’s questions about mortality, consciousness, technology, and transformation into a place where those questions are encountered in everyday life.
As visitors move through the installation, the boundaries between the real and imagined, the clinical and the virtual, begin to feel increasingly porous. In this charged setting, DOKU: TRIAGE asks viewers to consider where identity resides, and how it might continue to shift when the body itself is only one form among many.
“The boundaries between the real and imagined, the clinical and the virtual, begin to feel increasingly porous.”
Opening September 11 from 6–10 p.m., the exhibition will remain on view through September 20, with daily hours from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free.
Lu Yang, “Doku the Flow,” Courtesy the artist and Société Berlin.
Lu Yang, “DOKU the Self,” 2022, video still, courtesy of the artist.
Lu Yang, “Doku the Flow,” Courtesy the artist and Société Berlin.
