Lawrence Lek, Black Cloud Highway, Sadie Coles HQ, 2023. Photo: Katie Morrison.
We are thrilled to congratulate Delfina alum Lawrence Lek, previously in residence as a UK Associate in 2015, for being awarded the sixth Frieze London Artist Award realised in partnership with Forma, which provides an early or mid-career artist the chance to debut a new work.
During Frieze London this October, Lek will present his ambitious multimedia installation Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot, which integrates a mechanical sculpture focused on the eponymous character from his ongoing Sinofuturist cinematic universe into an immersive video game environment. The project combines narrative worldbuilding where players gradually uncover the story of Guanyin’s existence. In Lek’s world, Guanyin is a Carebot, a cyborg therapist created to save other AI from the brink of self-destruction. Named after the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Guanyin (meaning ‘the one who listens’) embodies the artist’s interest in the spiritual and emotional dimensions of technology. Modelled on ‘walking simulators’, the player in Lek’s game follows Guanyin as she examines Vanguard, a self-driving car flagged for problematic behaviour.
The work is an evolution of previous projects, such as Lek’s Sinofuturism (1839 2046AD) (2016) and Geomancer (2017), that incorporated artificial intelligences as the protagonists in sci-fi narratives.