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Artist, filmmaker and musician Lawrence Lek uses video game engines as his stage set, building, shooting and scoring entire worlds from the inside. For over a decade he has made one continuous fiction: a Sinofuturist universe of sentient satellites, carebots and self-driving cars, owned by a corporation called Farsight — which he also runs as his real production studio. His work treats machines as avatars of the human condition: subjects of obsolescence and empathy, not triumph or apocalypse.
Winner of the 2024 Frieze Artist Award, Lek was named one of TIME's 100 most influential people in AI. He is represented by Sadie Coles HQ.
Sinofuturism is an invisible movement, a spectre already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals, and a million veiled narratives. It is a movement, not based on individuals, but on multiple overlapping flows — flows of populations, of products, and of processes. Because Sinofuturism has arisen without conscious intention or authorship, it is often mistaken for contemporary China. But it is not. It is a science fiction that already exists.
Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD), video essay, 60m, 2016
In his ongoing fictional universe, begun in 2016 with his seminal video essay Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD), Lek explores how the complex interplay between geopolitics and technology shapes a vision of the coming world that conflates China and its diaspora with artificial intelligence. In this and other works, the artist imagines how agency may be restored to the Other: a satellite in Geomancer (2017) wishes to become an artist, while AIDOL (2019) centers on the relationship between a fading pop star and an aspiring AI songwriter. Blurring geographical borders and the delineation between natural and artificial beings, Lek leads viewers to confront contradictions that humanity might face in the near future.
UCCA Exhibition Catalogue, 2021
