Lawrence Lek

Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD)

Lawrence Lek

Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD), 2017

Full HD Video, 60m00s

Produced by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge

Courtesy: The artist

Curated by Toke Lykkeberg & Tranen in collaboration with Kunsthal Charlottenborg

“Sinofuturism is an invisible movement. A spectre already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals, and a million veiled narratives.“ Thus opens the artist Lawrence Lek’s film Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD) from 2017 about a new Chinese futurism.

Lek’s video essay, exactly 60 minutes long, outlines a series of clichés about Chinese society, which draw a picture of the future. This future is likened to contemporary China, a voice-over explains. However, in reality, Sinofuturism is rather a ”science fiction that already exists.”

Through an exposition of seven stereotypes of China concerning activities such as computing, copying, studying and labour, Lek presents the cultural and technological development of China as an articifial intelligence in action:

“Sinofuturism is in fact a form of artificial intelligence: A massively distributed neural network focused on copying rather than originality, addicted to learning a massive amount of raw data rather than philosophical critique or morality with a posthuman capacity for work in an unprecedented sense of collective will to power.”

Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD) combines elements of science fiction, documentary melodrama, social realism and Chinese cosmologies. Sinofuturism is presented as a period, which begins in 1839 with the Opium Wars. The period ends in 2046, when the so-called technological singularity is said to kick in, i.e. the point, when artificial intelligence will transcend human intelligence with unpredictable consequences.

The presentation of Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD) is an extension of the exhibition Welcome too late curated by Toke Lykkeberg and produced by Kunsthal Charlottenborg and CPH:DOX in 2017. The exhibition dealt with art at a time, when everything from climate to technology develops at exponential growth rates. While the present becomes ever more fleeting, much contemporary art is decreasingly contemporary, i.e. ‘with time’. Instead much recent art is extemporary, i.e. ”out of time”. Many artists working today tend to focus less on the present and more on other and bigger temporalities.

Lawrence Lek (b. 1982, Frankfurt am Main) is a London-based simulation artist who creates site-specific virtual worlds, video game essays and speculative films. Lek is born in Frankfurt, has lived in Hong Kong and is based in London.

Thanks to: Joni Zhu, Steve Goodman, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Deforrest Brown, Samantha Culp, Justin Kim, Stephanie Bailey, Alvin Li, AVANT.org, After Us, Film & Video Umbrella, UCCA, Wysing Arts Centre

Chinese Subtitles by Wenfei Wang for ‘The New Normal’, an exhibition at UCCA, Beijing.