Back to the Future: Choi Goen and Lawrence Lek

It’s hard to imagine two more different approaches to the Frieze Artist Award’s 2024 theme of ‘advanced technologies’ than those of Choi Goen and Lawrence Lek. The winners in Seoul (Choi) and London (Lek) use, respectively, defunct household appliances and artificial intelligence. Choi’s work is scrap metal; Lek’s is glittering digital superfutures.

Both artists, though, look beyond the surface. For Choi, this means dragging (sometimes literally) the flytipped junk of technological consumerism into the gallery space. For Lek, it means following the thread of machine sentience to one of its logical conclusions: humans are sophisticated beings, so why shouldn’t an equally sophisticated AI be prey to the same existential doubts?

Lek’s Frieze Artist Award commission at Frieze London 2024 is titled Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot. The latest episode in his ‘Sinofuturist’ filmic universe – which elides the alterity of AI with Western conceptions of China – it tells the story of an AI therapist involved in the case of a self-driving car on trial for attempted murder. The absurdity of the narrative makes it feel remote; its psychology resonates with deep familiarity. When I speak to her, Amy Ireland, theorist and editor of imprint Urbanomic, quotes Lek as saying: ‘I don’t just think about how much humanity anthropomorphizes AI. Instead, I start to wonder how I am like a machine, even when I’m trying to be creative.’

Val Ravaglia – curator of Tate Modern’s upcoming exhibition ‘Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet’ – sees this point as central to the current debate around AI, especially ‘generated’ art: ‘AI artefacts are getting so good at passing for straight documentation or non-automated art,’ she explains over email, ‘that it has profound consequences on the way humanity processes and interfaces with reality.’

Choi’s choice of materials also relates to a wider discussion between the convenient historical binary idea of man and machine. By foregrounding discarded white goods and industrial materials such as pipes, cabling and ducting in her work, Choi is ‘using the technical legacy of previous generations’, as Yoon Yuli, chief curator of Seoul’s Ilmin Museum of Art, writes in Frieze Week Seoul magazine. ‘Young [Korean] artists don’t want to blend in with a space; they seek to break away from treating a material as a relational or historical ingredient.’ Part of the now is remaking the past. When Choi exhibited her sculpture of an air conditioner shell (White Home Yard, 2019) in the courtyard of Seoul Museum of Art, it was not just to critique the profligacy of late capitalism; it was to say: This building – and your building – contains these machines. Why should they not be acknowledged? In a 2024 Frieze video, Choi explains: ‘Today, technology seems to be invisible and conceptualized. But technology still relies on a material foundation.’

In a recent series of works, one of which is being shown at Frieze Seoul, Choi takes the ubiquitous copper piping of central-heating and aircon systems (and the bread and butter of metal scavengers from Detroit to Delhi) and manipulates it, flattening it or sticking it through gallery walls. Joon says of Choi’s Frieze Seoul installation at COEX: ‘The pipes pierce the building’s skin, stitching wall to wall, surface to surface.’ As the body runs on its nervous and circulatory systems, Choi’s invasive pipework and elegantly sculpted white goods make manifest these systems and show the wonder of their structure and sophistication. ‘Pipes, like air conditioners, have an elemental property of being hidden,’ explains Choi. ‘And the pipes spread like blood vessels throughout the city.’

Seeing infrastructure as an ever-shifting, quasi-animal body is also a rebuttal of the Western narrative of an ominous, advancing technology – something that Choi shares with Lek. ‘The default Western humanist perspective on technology is quite macho and antagonistic,’ Ireland tells me. ‘We feel threatened by AI, as if it were a challenger or a rival, and we are always asking ourselves how we might be able to control or contain it.’

The ebb and flow of our ‘relationship with technology’ (as it is always tellingly called) is nothing new. Lek and Choi – through diverse approaches – confound the idea that, at any given moment, these concepts must be wholly good or wholly bad. Is the fear that you may be talking to a robot better or worse than the visceral ick of a stranger’s fridge? AI is just the latest in a series of these encounters, according to Ravaglia. ‘The internet shifted the emphasis towards the social aspects of computing,’ she says. ‘Digital technologies connected people and facilitated access to culture, ideologies, services, etc. Now they have become uncanny again, and we are reminded of the time when computers were unfamiliar entities in our lives.’

In their different ways, both Lek and Choi expand and challenge established ideas about technological ‘progress’, whether historical or prospective. ‘Part of Lek’s critique of the Western perspective on technology involves rejecting linear approaches to time, history and development,’ says Ireland. ‘His recurrent references to deities and concepts from the ancient world are always in dialogue with futuristic ideas.’

Though their works may look like dystopian predictions of worlds in thrall to machines that sustain existence and/or alien ‘artificial’ intelligence, at heart, Lek and Choi are investigating the human and the immediate. In the words of the narrator of Lek’s 2016 work Berlin Mirror, ‘[Art] is my way of resurrecting the present.’

‘During Frieze Seoul,’ says Choi, 'I hope that seeing the hidden bodies that have been made invisible will prompt us to think about the things that we don’t often recognize, that are often dealt with only conceptually.’ Ireland finds a parallel in Lek’s work: ‘It prompts us to ask: What if, instead of always looking for the human in the machinic, we looked for the machinic in the human?’

Discover Choi Goen’s new sculptural installations, White Home Wall: Welcome and Gloria, at Frieze Seoul, 4 – 7 September 2024. The commission is realized with the support of Bulgari.

Lawrence Lek debuts his video work, Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot, at Frieze London, 9 – 13 October 2024. Co-commissioned and co-produced with Forma, with thanks to supporting partner Bowers & Wilkins.

Amy Ireland is in conversation with Lawrence Lek for the Frieze Artist Award at No.9 Cork Street on 11 October 2024.

‘Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet’, curated by Val Ravaglia, is at Tate Modern, 28 November 2024 – 1 June 2025.

Further Information 

Frieze London and Frieze Masters, The Regent’s Park, 9 – 13 October 2024.

Tickets to Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2024 are on sale now.

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^{Footage courtesy: Lawrence Lek, NOX (2023), commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, Berlin}