Sinofuturism (1839 – 2046 AD) from Lawrence Lek on Vimeo.
“Sino-Futurism is an invisible movement. A spectre already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals, and a million veiled narratives. It is a movement, not based on individuals, but on multiple overlapping flows….it is often mistaken for contemporary China. But it is not. It is a science fiction that already exists,” begins the generated voice narration of Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD), a video essay by artist Lawrence Lek. Born in Frankfurt and having spent his childhood in Hong Kong, Singapore, and London where he is currently based, Lek is certainly no stranger to the fragmentation and dispersal of China and the Sinitic via globalisation and diaspora. Having already counted a few distinguished awards in video in his rising career, as well as a background in architecture, Lek creates speculative worlds and site-specific simulations using gaming software, video, installation, and most recently, VR feature film. As stated by the artist on Sinofuturism, Western media presents China as exotic, strange, bizarre, kitsch, tacky, or cheap. In domestic media, China is portrayed as heroic, stable, historic, grand, and unified. Rather than counteract these narratives, Lek’s work pushes them even further. By embracing seven key stereotypes of Chinese society — Computing, Copying, Gaming, Studying, Addiction, Labour and Gambling — Lek’s prototypal pseudo-documentary Sinofuturism, proposes that China’s technological development constitutes a new form of Artificial Intelligence.
Film still from Sinofuturism (1839 – 2046 AD), courtesy of the artist
Film still from Sinofuturism (1839 – 2046 AD), courtesy of the artist
SCREEN: Is Sinofuturism a concept you created or are you expanding on already existing notions of Sinofuturism?
Lawrence Lek: I think “Sinofuturism” definitely does exist in many ways, without naming it as it was…. China and technology are talked about to death in terms of nationalism, civic pride, 5,000 years of history; all these positive notions to do with solidarity and continuity. At the same time, Chinese industrialization is often attacked, either from a neoliberal Republican point of view, or that China inherited the Soviet Union’s role as the bad guy. I was basically becoming aware of things that I’d always felt, but never put a name to.
In the Sinofuturism video essay, I wanted to bring all of these cultural cliches, politicized points of view together, and treat them seriously. With Sinofuturism, I was thinking particularly about certain Chinese stereotypes, all of these “bad habits”. But what if we thought of cultural phenomena in a critical way, as something that is actually really deep and potentially revealing? I feel that for these aspects, there’s an objective reason behind each one of them. That’s the cultural undercurrent of Sinofuturism, which really came about through my discussions with other people.
Another conversation I was having with Steve Goodman (AKA Kode9) was about Afrofuturists, who, rather than saying “you owe us human rights and have some moral imperative to be better to us”, Afrofuturists said “No, we’re not going to appeal to your humanity; we’re just going to exaggerate some of those same things you’ve applied to us. You treated us like workers, so we’re going to envision ourselves as super-workers, and therefore super robots. We didn’t come from earth, we came from outer space.”
I think the equivalent of the super-robot for Sinofuturists would be AI. The Orientalist conception is that the Orient is the “Other”, eternally unknowable and mysterious. So much of what is being said about the emergence of post-human intelligence, is that it’s also the “Other”, in that AI could turn out to be utopian or apocalyptic. These hopes and fears are coming from the same place as had been ascribed to Chinese cultural, economic, industrial development. As they come from the same source, you can begin to overcome cultural clichés via these patterns. So it’s not just this social critique, but there’s also an idea of the solution, or product that can come out of a certain way of thinking.
Film still from Sinofuturism (1839 – 2046 AD), courtesy of the artist
SCREEN: How does Sinofuturism relate to say, a broader Asia-Futurism?
LL: The idea of Asia Futurism is well-documented in Hollywood; whether it’s the Ghost in the Shell remake, The Last Airbender, Bladerunner. What I’m interested in is something much deeper than the vision of the Asian metropolis. With Sinofuturism, you get cities, architectural renderings, iphones, knock-offs of iPhones, knock-offs of knock-offs of iPhones, etc. Whereas the product of Sinofuturism is ultimately this economic cycle of supply and demand. There’s a shift from China being an agricultural producer, to industrial, to high-tech industrial producer, to being a producer of everything, essentially because it’s very good at copying and working. I think the difference is simply because the country is producing so much of the world’s products, tools, and systems, which obviously increasingly becomes more of the world’s technology, IT, and software. Because China operates in a different economic sphere, it’s effect is different as well. When I say Sinofuturism, of course it means China, but it doesn’t just mean China, it’s means the current economy and the world ideology its caught up in as well. And obviously some of these relationships and narratives are very old and have nothing to do with the West.
SCREEN: In Orientalist movies, there’s a cultural erasure where all that’s left is the environment. I’m curious about human presence in your work, which depicts AI, economics, infrastructure, but not necessarily living bodies or cultures.
LL: The primary artistic reason for emptiness in my work, is my interest in the first person point of view. In cinema, 95% of shots are from a third-person camera. Whereas with video games or interactivity, you are the subject, you are the hero. Emptying the world out of anything but objects is, for me, a fundamental shift from spectatorship to agency. Of course visually, what’s on the screen might appear dystopian, because we’re so used to this subliminal language of post-apocalyptic worlds, Asia after the nuclear holocaust, or China without people. There’s that intimate psychological aspect where you project your inner world onto everything that you see. And the moment you see a human face, or even an avatar, that spell is broken because then you think about sociality, language, communication. But I’m interested in what’s beyond that level of identity and relationships.
Film still from Sinofuturism (1839 – 2046 AD), courtesy of the artist
SCREEN: Do you have a background in computer-science or video game design?
LL: I originally studied architecture actually, because I’m really interested in the worlds human create …. In architecture, you’re always working in the future…. creating this vision or promise of the future. CGI, 3D rendering, video walkthroughs, etc., these so-called artist impressions, are all tools. So what if you can take those same tools of the 21st century, of utopia and illusion like in architecture and filmmaking, to push that further. I also feel that the traditional role architecture used to play in providing social space or cultural symbolism, is lost. There isn’t the trust in government or respect for cultural institutions that there used to be. Rather than being purely against it however, I feel there are other spaces and ways to create beyond physical objects.
Film still from Sinofuturism (1839 – 2046 AD), courtesy of the artist
Film still from Sinofuturism (1839 – 2046 AD), courtesy of the artist
SCREEN: How does site-specificity inform your work?
LL: In classical site-specific work, there was a lot of interest in getting away from the generic site-lessness of Modernism. When I was working in architecture, there was this fascination with the digital, the algorithm, and what fancy shapes you could create with computers. The problem of course is that’s exactly like Modernism; any topography becomes just a shape, so anywhere on earth is just a shape. You can make any shape fit anywhere with a computer. My idea of site-specific is to turn that relationship around, it’s not so much that the object is on the site and the site changes, rather because of this first person perspective, you never move, and the world that revolves around you is particular to your point of view. It’s just an inversion, and not in this narcissistic way, but as a result of how information flows and how people move today, have become less local.
SCREEN: What is the goal of Sinofuturism, if there is one?
LL: I think that’s a really interesting thing, just the idea of having a goal. In artistic practice, it’s unfashionable to say “I have a goal”. As much as I say there is no goal for Sinofuturism, the video essay right at the end emphasizes that, just like a kind of life form, it’s goal is to survive and live on. Generalizing hugely, I feel the goal of Sino-culture is survival, to survive and replicate those 5,000 years of history. The paradox is that it’s both incredibly artificial and organic. That stops it from merely being technocratic; there’s something not just human about that, but something universal.
SCREEN: Does Sinofuturism exist outside of its video essay form? Or will it?
LL: Essentially, my projects over the next year will weave into different ideas of Sinofuturism. The video I’m working on right now [a VR film titled Geomancer: (Portrait of the Artist as a Young AI), on view through March 20, 2017] is the fictional version of Sinofuturism. The premise of the film is about a Singaporean satellite AI that wants to be an artist. If there was something that was so intelligent but was literally invented because of government research, how would it react to being autonomous? What might AI want to do creatively? Using science fiction terms, and thinking ahead to future art history will be really interesting as well. I think for the 21st century, there are so many micro movements here and there, and the cycles turn faster and faster. So in terms of Sinofuturism, I’m happy to have this framework that is personal and not just intellectual, which draws from things I’ve seen in mass media, novels, to high culture, or just stuff my grandparents used to talk about, all wound up together.
Lawrence Lek (born Frankfurt 1982. Lives and works in London). His work is currently being/has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including recent shows at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf, Germany, 2016; Tramway, as part of Glasgow International 2016; Seoul Museum of Art, as part of Seoul Mediacity Biennial 2016, KW Institut, Berlin, Germany; Cubitt Gallery, London; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge and the Delfina Foundation, London. He is recipient of the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2016, the Tenderflix/Tenderpixel Artist Video Award, and the 2015 Dazed Emerging Artist Award.
