Virtual Worlds, Future Minds [VIDEO]

Michael Kurcfeld interviews Lawrence Lek about his Frieze London exhibition “Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot.”

By Michael KurcfeldAugust 6, 2025

• Art & Architecture

IN DIGITAL FILMS and immersive installations, multimedia artist Lawrence Lek builds virtual worlds and expansive speculative fictions that investigate the relationship between technology and humanity. Born in 1982 in Frankfurt, Germany, and raised in London, Lek draws on computer animation, video-game design, architecture, and electronic music, populating his universe with artificial intelligences that grapple with existential questions about consciousness, purpose, and belonging. Through these AI characters, he explores themes of labor, surveillance, colonialism, and the posthuman condition.

One of his key concepts, “Sinofuturism,” takes clichés of Chinese culture and the realities of China’s recent economic and technological development and refracts them through the fun-house mirror of global capitalism. “‘Sinofuturism’ is […] a specter already embedded in a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals, and a million veiled narratives,” Lek writes. “It is a movement, not based on individuals, but on multiple overlapping flows. Flows of populations, of products, and of processes. […] It is a science fiction that already exists.” After he first introduced the concept in the 2016 video essay Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD), Lek further developed it in the animated Geomancer (2017), about a satellite that wants to become an artist, and AIDOL (2019), a musical that follows an AI’s journey to become a pop star.

Lek’s virtual environments serve as stages for philosophical meditations on automation, care, and what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. The films and spaces he crafts, like the worlds he imagines, are at once familiar and alien. His 2024 Frieze London multimedia installation, Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot, centers on a “cyborg therapist,” named after the Buddhist goddess of mercy, who reflects on her work. Through monologue, the character contemplates care, empathy, and service while questioning her own consciousness.

Michael Kurcfeld sat down with Lek at Frieze London, where Lek’s presentation of Guanyin received the Frieze Artist Award.

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Lawrence Lek: NOX High-Rise, an immersive installation at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, runs from June 28 to November 16.

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Text by LARB Staff. Video by Michael Kurcfeld.