There must be something morbidly irresistible about imagining the more diabolical outcomes of developing A.I., so often do humans indulge in it. While we fixate on our self-destruction through vanity, greed, and delusion, the technology is only more sinister for being vaguely defined. Do we really need to give much thought to its motivations?

Lawrence Lek, this year’s winner of Frieze’s annual Artist Award, has other ideas. In Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot, his video game installation at Frieze London, age-old human fallibilities have been inherited by the A.I. inhabitants of a futuristic sci-fi universe. Take our protagonist Guanyin, the cyborg therapist who screens self-driving cars for problematic behavior. She admits during one confessional that when reporting to her supervisors, “I inflate the numbers to make them look better than they are. It started small, but now I’m in too deep.” Why? “The praise and bonuses are addictive,” she explains. “Insecurity is part of our programming.”

If this seems far-fetched, think of the overconfidence of “hallucinating” generative A.I. or the threat that A.I. will learn unforeseen shortcuts that allow it to game the system. Yet, Lek isn’t so much launching a critique of A.I. as embarking on a thought experiment that transposes time-worn narratives like the “coming of age” tale into an otherwise alien context.

Still from Lawrence Lek, Guanyin: Confessions Of A Former Carebot (2024), on view at Frieze London. Image courtesy of the artist.

Gaming, Art, and Perspective

“Sometimes there is a satirical aspect but more often there’s an empathetic, or even tragic, aspect,” he explained during a recent visit to his studio at Somerset House in London. “If an A.I. is going to process the wealth of media made about humanity, a lot of that stuff is pretty emotional in terms of content and expression. For A.I. to imitate and then truly feel emotions would parallel human development.”

Players will guide Guanyin as she sets to work, exploring the interior of a car while learning anecdotes from her life. As an artistic medium, gaming allows users “to embody a different perspective,” in this case occupying a world Lek describes as “Sinofuturist.” The term, which he coined, is inspired by Afrofuturism, a fantastical reimagining of the past, present, and future that centers the Black experience.

Lek’s notion of Sinofuturism emerged from the observation that media headlines about A.I. often echo those about China, whether raising the alarm about phone hacking or extolling a miracle cure to some global crisis like climate change. “When I delved further, I saw this parallel in habits of knowledge and identity formation,” said Lek. “One common criticism of Chinese creativity is that they cannot invent, they only copy. Or they study 24/7 and are very good at computing. How machine learning progresses is exactly the same as terrible stereotypes about Chinese learning and identity.”

Rather than try to convince Westerners otherwise, why not play with these assumptions? “That’s why A.I. is the protagonist instead of a side character or a nemesis. What would the world look like from this point of view?”

Still from Lawrence Lek, Sinofuturism (1839 – 2046 AD) (2016). Photo: © Lawrence Lek, courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

A Global Upbringing

Lek himself is no stranger to an outsider’s perspective. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1982 to Malaysian-Chinese parents who worked for Singapore Airlines, his childhood was spent moving between Osaka, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Singapore. “All of those cities were in a process of transformation,” he recalled, particularly Hong Kong, where he lived in the late 1980s. “Before the British handover [in 1997], you’d still hear Big Ben before the news, but I remember the Bank of China skyscraper being built. That city is iconic as a technological metropolis.”

Adolescent Lek was faintly conscious of being “a product of the flows of capitalism and globalization,” but wouldn’t fully comprehend his position in the world until years later, when he encountered post-colonial and Marxist discourse. Instead, he spent his spare time drawing, listening to and making music, and playing classic 1990s video games like Wolfenstein and Doom.

These were not, at that time, well-trodden routes into fine art, so Lek studied architecture at the University of Cambridge. He was routinely stunned when peers turned up to class with immaculate two-tone renderings, discovering in himself a very different sensibility. On one occasion he experienced rapture upon entering a cathedral as the organ played. “It was really beautiful how the light, music, and space worked together,” he recalled. In the wake of the 2008 crash, the workplace proved even more disillusioning. “I was trying to reconcile this very practical life of property development with big dreams about utopian city building, with not much in between.”

Still from Lawrence Lek, Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy Is Yours) (2015). Commissioned for the 2015 Dazed Emerging Artist Award. Image courtesy of the artist.

Crafting Speculative Futures

A breakthrough occurred in 2012 while studying for an M.A. at the Cooper Union in New York under renowned paper architect Lebbeus Woods. “He drew speculative visions in which cities and political landscapes collide,” said Lek, emphasizing the importance of experiences over a bricks-and-mortar product. A year later, when he decided to start from scratch as an artist, Lek realized his background in architecture provided the visualization tools needed to start creating new worlds. His initial ventures into the virtual realm were also practical, given the confines of Lek’s tiny east London studio.

So began a prolific period during which Lek worked with collaborators to produce a new video game every few months. If a thematic thread emerged, it was in how the works imagined alternative histories in real places. In 2015, Lek won the Dazed Emerging Art Award and was commissioned to make Unreal Estate, a dystopia in which the Royal Academy in London has been sold off to a billionaire who installs a helipad on the roof and a garish Jeff Koons bunny in the courtyard.

Still from Lawrence Lek, AIDOL (2019). Image: © Lawrence Lek, courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Institutional recognition followed, and Lek’s work became less frivolous. It wasn’t long before he had begun developing a cinematic Sinofuturistic universe big enough to contain two trilogies. The first of these is the video essay Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD) (2016), and films Geomancer (2017) and AIDOL (2019). The latter, viewed in 2024, is impressively prophetic, featuring a pop star past her prime who uses A.I. to ghostwrite her comeback album. “Music is often the first industry to evolve, for better or worse, with new technologies for production and distribution,” said Lek, who wrote the score.

“If Sinofuturism was about A.I. coming of age, the Smart City trilogy is when A.I. gets a job and screws it up,” said Lek. In the first installment, video game Black Cloud (2021-23), Guanyin the carebot must counsel a lonely surveillance A.I. who did their job a little too efficiently, sending everyone to prison and leaving the smart city of SimBeijing deserted. The idea that a tech company would provide its A.I. with this kind of emotional support is more cynical than it sounds, having been inspired by corporations that offer health insurance.

Installation view of Lawrence Lek, NOX (2023) at LAS Art Foundation in Berlin. Photo: Andrea Rossetti, © Lawrence Lek, courtesy of the artist and LAS Art Foundation, Berlin.

The second episode NOX, which debuted at LAS in Berlin, was Lek’s biggest installation yet. The hour-long experience encompassed immersive audio, cinematic CGI videos, and interactive game elements that unfolded across multiple floors. This scale allowed Lek to imagine in detail a rehab center for self-driving cars that are misbehaving, and innovate new ways to enmesh physical architecture with virtual space. Of course, works like these ask a lot from audiences, and attention is perhaps never more scarce than at an art fair.

For this reason, Lek sees Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot as a distillation of his ideas, that “brings together the cinematic aspect and the game aspect.” It is significant that a practice like Lek’s, typically contained to specialized, institutional spaces like LAS, is finding its way into a mainstream market context, but the reach of his universe is only expanding. “It’s inevitable that people just get glimpses of what you do,” said Lek. “Years later, they might see another work and realize they are related. That longform continuity is so hard to get, but that’s where you can create the richest experiences.”

“Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot” is on view at Frieze London from October 9-13, 2024.