Lawrence Lek: Welcome to the future

My conversation with Lawrence Lek takes place under a wooden structure recognizable from several of his computer-animated films – which is also, it turns out, a convenient place for the artist to dry his socks. Located in the basement of London’s neoclassical Somerset House, Lek’s studio is filled with well-thumbed literature, stacked suitcases, and the many computers with which he builds his distinctively immersive virtual environments. It is perhaps apt that Lek takes up a subterranean space in the bowels of a historically significant institution: his work itself functions as a sort of architectural unconscious, from which various chronologies and power networks unfurl. If, as he told me, ‘authenticity and escapism are closely linked,’ his studio location surely stands at their dizzying crossroads.

Lek – whose solo show ‘Farsight Freeport’, opens at Basel's HeK on September 4, 2019 – uses gaming software and computer-generated graphics to make films and VR works that act as sites for critical inquiry. He places the viewer into hinterlands between the realized and the speculative. Often drawing on his experience at the global architectural firm Foster and Partners, Lek retraces architectural ideals found in cultural and civic spaces (typically loaded with nationalist and political agendas) and sets them adrift on alternative vectors. In Europa, Mon Amour (2016 Brexit Edition) (2016), the UK is rendered a scorched and desiccated island, where a ruined East End cinema plays the 1959 French New Wave classic Hiroshima mon amour, observed solely by Union flag-decorated drones.In Unreal Estate (the Royal Academy is yours) (2015), the London museum is recast as a palatial homestead for sale in a remote tropical wilderness; a synthesized voice-over details, with unnerving pragmatism, how to manage the vast property and staff. (Disturbingly, the text is translated from an article in Russia’s edition of Tatler magazine.) Lek builds cognitive frictions between past and present – featuring, among others, global conglomerates, megabrands, cultural resistance groups, and even the vestiges of 1990s rave counterculture – to form a disturbing mirror that reflects the anxiety of an increasingly automated world in which what defines ‘humanness’ is ever harder to discern.

Born in Frankfurt to Malaysian-Chinese parents in 1982, Lek spent his formative years in Southeast Asia, growing up in pre-handover Hong Kong and in Singapore, which had gained independence in 1965. The formative sense of living in a country reconstructed out of recent colonial history is palpable throughout Lek’s work, and the hyper-contemporary Singaporean skyline crops up in many of his films as an autobiographical cameo of sorts. Singapore, like the UAE, is associated with a type of environment often referred to as a ‘non-place’ – the transient spaces of the airport, the hotel, or the shopping mall. But Lek challenges the negative views of these ‘non-places’ famously held by the writer Marc Augé and the architect Rem Koolhaas. ‘They are not made of void,’ he says. ‘They are filled with whatever happens in them.’

While many of the artist’s previous works are simulations of pre-existing structures, Nøtel (2016), which was presented by Sadie Coles HQ in the Unlimited sector of Art Basel’s 2019 Basel edition, is the first for which Lek designed the building from scratch. Beginning as an audiovisual collaboration with the sound artist and writer Steve Goodman (known as Kode9), this virtually-rendered hotel – a vast orbital doughnut that resembles Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, courtesy of his architectural alma mater – has been imagined by Lek for occupants seeking complete security and privacy to placate their creeping anxieties. Here, all service is automated, all desires pre-empted by algorithms. The onslaught of war, floods, and terrorism is muted, while interactions with servants are mercifully absent.

Under the greenish glow of neon, we survey Nøtel’s haunted terrain from the ambiguous viewpoint of a drone. Room upon empty room is accompanied by the sounds of distorted high-frequency noises, contemporary alarm tones, and several voice-overs offering solace to ‘global nomads’ looking for a ‘fortress of luxury’ – perhaps not too unlike the owners of the countless luxury apartments mushrooming in global capitals worldwide. Nøtel, it seems, magnifies this trend: property is no longer a ‘deposit box in the sky’ but has become a ‘panic room turned cityscape’.

If architecture is the decorative armature that protects us from the wider world of conflict and stress, it is also increasingly dependent on automation. During our conversation, we turn to how questions of security have been increasingly concerned with biometric borders. While our bodies are digitally scanned and recorded most commonly when passing through borders (with some benefiting from speedier transits), this information is increasingly gathered to enhance government control. Jackie Wang’s 2019 essay for the Venice Biennale’s Taiwan Pavilion catalog, Global High-Tech Panopticon, reflects on these new conditions, stating that we have now become Homo carceralis: a species characterized by a compulsion to confine, even at the cost of its own privacy – and, in many cases, its freedom. However, Lek revels in these contradictory subjects, understanding, he says, the desire to ‘want to relax, want to win, want to go home.’ His work is about creating enough empty spaces to allow these thoughts to coexist. Throughout Nøtel there is a neurotic, restless quest for relaxation, for zoning out. However, describing an experience he once had in a flotation tank, Lek reflects that ‘relaxation is not chill’ – the idea of dark, solitudinous time is ultimately stressful. 

‘Loneliness is a collective; it is a city,’ writes Olivia Laing in her 2016 book The Lonely City, which describes a myriad of coexistences held together unknowingly. This prism of thought is one that carries to the edges of Lek’s work, where social spaces and leisure are not constituted physically, but defined via isolated gaming communities. This is particularly visible in his recent installation and feature-length film AIDOL (2019), presented at Sadie Coles HQ in London, which is replete with mood lights and soft white furnishings. Lek presents a world of the year 2065, where players (either ‘Bio’ or ‘Synth’) obsess over online games and music franchises, as all labor has been absorbed by AI. When the formerly famous singer Diva struggles to achieve a comeback on the world’s stage, she co-opts the help of an aspiring AI songwriter. The boundary between the so-called authentic voice and that of the algorithm has long been disintegrating, but in AIDOL, Lek goes one step further. ‘Stop being a bio-supremacist,’ says one of his eSports commentators, announcing the start of a tournament between humans and AI; in Lek’s brave new world, any distinction between the biological and the algorithmic has become tantamount to exclusion.  

Throughout, AIDOL filters snippets of information about codes of living in 2065 into disorientating circuits of meaning. These networks closely resemble that of global neoliberal companies whose very existence rests on obliquity and offshore finances. Lek’s work darkly reproduces these conditions, in part to reveal what is accessible and what is held at bay through suppressive structures. By adopting their language, Lek points to ways in which we might begin to untangle them and find the possibility of alternative routes. When I ask whether the artist considers himself an optimist, he answers, ‘My work is not pessimistic, it doesn’t end.’ In Lek’s looping virtual worlds, we can surmise that loneliness is a collective, that safe spaces and shelters need not turn into bunkers and crypts. Through Lek’s dystopias, game-playing is reconsidered with serious intent. He invites us to ask: who is designing our futures – and how will we play them?

Chris McCormack is a writer and associate editor of Art Monthly.

Lawrence Lek's work was shown by Sadie Coles HQ in the Unlimited sector of Art Basel’s 2019 Basel edition. Discover all the artists and galleries which participated in the 2019’s Unlimited sector here.