“Welcome to Nepenthe. You came here to forget, don’t you remember? You heard about it long ago: The antidote for sorrow, a drug for forgetting…”
Named after the medicine for sorrow in Greek mythology, Nepenthe is an ongoing series of video game installations exploring the role of memory in virtual worlds. The fourth edition, Nepenthe (Summer Palace Ruins), reimagines the legacy of British colonialism through a virtual and physical re-creation of the ruins of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace. Widely regarded as the pinnacle of classical Chinese garden palace design, the Palace was destroyed by a combined Anglo-French expeditionary force during the Second Opium War in 1860.
Produced as a walkthrough travelogue, the video features a traveler searching for the reconstructed ruin and for the whereabouts of Looty, the Pekingese dog brought home as a gift from soldiers to Queen Victoria. Voiceover monologue is combined with in-game subtitles to introduce the history of the island, interspersed with ideas of digital ruins, buried museums, and the future of memory.
In the accompanying game, the player can explore the deserted island of Nepenthe, which contains the sites of the project’s previous exhibition spaces. As with his other open-world games 2065 (2018–) and Nøtel (2018–), Lek expands the virtual environment of Nepenthe with each new exhibition. The project was previously featured at the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2021), Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, and Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (both 2022).
