“Because Sinofuturism has arisen without conscious intention or authorship, it is often mistaken for contemporary China. But it is not. It is a science fiction that already exists.”
Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) is a video essay exploring the parallels between portrayals of artificial intelligence and Chinese technological development. Lek combines elements of science fiction, documentary melodrama, social realism, and Chinese cosmologies to examine the present-day dilemmas of China and the people of its diaspora.
Drawing inspiration from Afrofuturism and Gulf Futurism, Sinofuturism presents a critical and playful approach to subverting cultural clichés. In Western media and Orientalist perceptions, China is exotic, strange, bizarre, kitsch, tacky, or cheap. In its domestic media, China portrayed as heroic, stable, historic, grand, and unified. Rather than counteract these skewed narratives, Sinofuturism proposes to push them much further. By embracing seven key stereotypes of Chinese society —Computing, Copying, Gaming, Studying, Addiction, Labour and Gambling — it shows how China’s technological development can be seen as a form of Artificial Intelligence.
The video essay was originally produced when Lek was researching the geopolitical status of artificial intelligence when writing the script for his later film Geomancer. By using overlapping voices and sonic fragments to achieve a multilayered narrative, Lek began to explore the potential of the Sinofuturist avatar as a form of Other with its own emerging voice.
The video essay is the first part of the Sinofuturist trilogy, followed by Geomancer (2017) and AIDOL (2019).
