Source: OZY.com (6/29/16)
THE NEXT ARTIST WHO’S ABOUT TO GET KICKED OUT OF CHINA
BY LESLIE NGUYEN-OKWU
![Lu yang by ka 5a s](http://pictures.ozy.com/pictures/450xany/8/1/1/92811_luyangbyka5a_s.jpg)
Lu Yang in the flesh. Source: Ka XiaoXi
An artist’s self-portrait: stuffy, vain, easy on the eye. Right? Not for Lu Yang, a scrappy 31-year-old new-media artist based in China. In a computer rendering of herself, Lu is naked and genderless, with electrodes jabbing at her brain like a lab rat. Then comes her callous death, her convulsing body slowly sliding into the charred furnace of a gaping MRI machine.
Lu Yang is no stranger to stirring up strife with her provocative videos and unsettling animations. “Revived Zombie Frogs Underwater Ballet” is exactly what it sounds like — Lu Yang sends electric shocks to dissected frogs to make them dance as they hover in water. Her latest pieces include both a massive floating kite of her head and an animation of her charred corpse flailing about in flames. And for good measure, “Uterus Man” rides a zooming pelvis chariot and flies like Iron Man by shooting blood out of his vagina — not just weird, but explicitly taboo. Clearly, Lu Yang doesn’t do hoity-toity. Instead, she dabbles and dives into thorny themes from biology, neurology and religion, some stuff that, she says, is “too hard-core” for China. As an artist, Lu isn’t just messing around with medium and form; she’s engaging in a struggle against a kind of cultural straightjacket in China that discourages people from openly and honestly broaching these topics. Continue reading Lu Yang, the next artist about to get kicked out of China