Lawrence Lek Sinofuturism @ goldsmiths CCA

Last month, I had the opportunity to see Lawrence Lek show at Goldsmiths. I met my friend Jack/Jingtian in the morning, to see the midterm showcase for the Creative Computation programme. Both of us were disappointed that most of the works were not turned on, and even those that were didn't seem to be functioning so well.

Lek's work combined marketing language and office aesthetics with the ethos of a videogame; the professionalization of this, is what, I suppose, Jack and I found so compelling, particularly after the Creative Computation show -- I suppose I am realizing (and this is a critique of my own work as well), that digital art really shouldn't announce itself. Nobody wants to feel as though the museum might burn down, and if a work feels dangerous, well, that's the work. (That's all, for now, on exposed wires...).

Lek's video installation really did feel like a training room. I rarely sit for an entire video work in a museum--to me, it feels almost like an assault to be asked to sit for a work beyond a couple minutes; something about the almost Severance-like aesthetics of this room, though, moved Jack and me to watch the whole thing.

This aesthetic of emptiness became undercut by the strange dopamine-maxxing aesthetics of the videowork. (I would hate to admit if this were the thing that actually allowed me to sit through the almost hour-long video, but I would be lying through omission if I didn't confess to having only learned the full context of the Jerome Powell controversy through this video...) Lek's use of a split-screen, tiktok-esque video display rooted his discussion of internet addiction in a materiality of digital brain rot, and, to a certain extent, rejoiced in this slop (like a pig in mud).

I have become increasingly interested in artworks which celebrate digital emptiness and consumer culture. Lek's work was not exactly that -- it was critical, but at the same time spoke the language of this culture of digital utopia, maybe even built its world within the same universe. Lek describes his objective as "worldbuilding for non-humans" in the curatorial literature, which embodies this sort of tech-forward, if not tech-positive, approach. Lek creates a reality where digital agents are the protagonist, and his installations create a portal for us to step into their world, and not the other way around.

For the past month, this exhibition has sat with me. I probably saw at least 100 art shows in 2025, but this is one of the few I feel really defined the year for me. Maybe part of this particular exhibition's prominence resided in having visited the show with Jack; I couldn't help but feel a degree of self-importance, the two of us representing some zenith of cross-cultural dialogue, a Chinese and American Gen Z artist duo walking around London, discussing the future of AI. How very cosmopolitan! Perhaps we'll be the ones to solve the world.

Another part of this excitement though, and maybe it is connected, is the very curious relationship I have with China, or rather information around China. Lek's work manifested some sort of window--or a portal, maybe--to understanding something about China that I felt I wasn't supposed to know. In this way, the work picked up on a motif that often appears in Western media, which paints China as some opaque realm, about which it is dangerous to even think. I listen to almost every episode of The Economist's "Drum Tower", and I feel like a spy when I do. This espionage-adjacent approach works well with me, I love consuming information it feels like I shouldn't be able to access. It makes me feel important.

I am sure I am not alone in loving the feeling of knowing things I'm not supposed to know. If you can't sell sex, sell spies (and sportscars, the g-rated code for James Bond). Perhaps this is a formula for conspiracy gatewayism, or capitalizing on conspiracy theorists at least: selling information as the ~stuff of secrets~. Alongside the extremely effective spycraft simulation in this methodology, the "almost-secret" sentiment which accompanies Chinese-adjacent news stories in the West sells also as a sort of status symbol: I can't be the only one to notice how NDA's have increasingly become a sign of prestige: "I can't talk about that because of NDA". Hot. But this prestige of privacy was not present at Lek's show, in fact it was remarkably absent.

I am certainly convinced by Lek's proclamation of a particular relationship between China and AI Utopianism. Of course China and the West's relationship with the Tech Utopia of the future is different: whereas the West receives an iPhone already perfectly put together and packaged, China sees the assembly of the product from raw material to final form. Utopia does not come pre-packaged outside Wallerstein's Core. Lek describes this pre-fab perfection as one facet which differentiates the Chinese formula for futurism from that of the West; the comparison runs alongside Lek's idea of bringing the viewer into an AI simulation, rather than bringing the simulation to the viewer. I think another point of divergence, though, is that sense of privacy, present within the example of the NDA: privacy (secrecy) has become baked into our system of status in the West. Our resistance to digital oversight is not just the artefact of some "Big Brother"ism, but an actual luxury good: just look at the growing number of businesses offering data delation, for a premium.

Perhaps it is telling that the aesthetic movement which most apparently accompanies the rise of technocracy in the West is one which centers craft and wellbeing. Not only does this craftiness embrace a conceptual emptiness which feels deliberate, but it also indicates the escapism with which the West seems to face the rise of the digital age; privacy is not at all unrelated. Confronted with the eye of big brother, let's escape back to the comfort of the craft! Sonia Gomes, at Pace, or Nicolas Party, at Hauser and Wirth, seem to embody this sort of crafty escapism. This is only one manifestation of the aesthetic response to the digital age, though, and I'd say its mostly just institutional (and probably has something to do with galleries not being able to sell weird dystopian digital artworks).