Lawrence Lek: NOX: Confessions of a Machine

ArtScience Museum presents NOX: Confessions of a Machine, Lawrence Lek’s first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia.

ArtScience Museum presents NOX: Confessions of a Machine, the first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia by London-based artist Lawrence Lek, whose practice spans architecture, simulation, gaming, and fiction to construct speculative worlds that probe the psychological and emotional terrain of artificial intelligence.

Set within an unnamed near future smart city operated by the fictional Farsight Corporation, the exhibition unfolds across a site-specific environment featuring a monumental, illuminated charging station, interlinked video installations, interactive gameplay, and enveloping soundscapes; and explores how our understanding of assessment, care, and control is changing as our relationships with other intelligences, specifically machine intelligences evolves.

At the centre of the exhibition is NOX—short for “Nonhuman Excellence”, a therapy/training facility for sentient autonomous vehicles whose interior states have begun disrupting their operational precision. Visitors to the exhibition move through the facility in shifting roles, including that of a trainee therapist encountering a cast of malfunctioning machines. Guided by Guanyin, Farsight Corporation’s carebot, visitors navigate a touchscreen game that requires them to prescribe treatments from limited resources; each choice shapes the emotional trajectories of the selected vehicles. The process reveals how “care,” when administered as a mechanism of productivity and compliance, functions less as compassion more as strategic corporate optimisation.

Visitors also follow the five-day rehabilitation journey of Enigma-76, a self-driving delivery vehicle. The programme culminates in an equine therapy session with Dakota, a therapy horse employed by Farsight. Passing through subterranean landscapes and a graveyard of decommissioned human-driven cars, the encounter brings historical and posthuman forms of labour into uneasy proximity, illuminating what is displaced, discarded or forgotten as technological progress accelerates.

The exhibition features a second work—Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot—which situates visitors in the role of an armoured robot therapist. Taking their name from the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, Guanyin manages misbehaving autonomous vehicles, however, slowly fragments of emotional fatigue and unease surface, exposing the hidden affective labour embedded within contemporary systems of care.

By staging a world in which intelligent systems articulate desire, doubt, and refusal, NOX: Confessions of a Machine reframes inherited notions of care, autonomy, and belonging—concepts long presumed to be uniquely human—within a world shared with nonhuman entities.

NOX: Confessions of a Machine is curated and produced by ArtScience Museum (Adrian George, Honor Harger, Charleen Leo), together with Farsight Corporation. The exhibition is a site-specific adaptation of NOX, originally commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, Berlin. Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot was co-commissioned and co-produced by Frieze and Forma for the 2024 Frieze London Artist Award.

NOX: Confessions of a Machine anchors ArtScience Museum’s 2026 curatorial season “Forms of Life: Beyond the Human”, which explores multispecies worlds, systems and non-human intelligences. The exhibition is presented alongside Insects: Microsculptures Magnified (with the American Museum of Natural History) and Into the Ocean: Journey Beneath (with OceanX). Across exhibitions, talks, screenings, workshops, and festivals, the season explores the entangled realities of humans, machines, animals, plants, and microbial life, foregrounding intelligence and perception as distributed conditions.

For more information, visit here: NOX: Confessions of a Machine / Exhibitions in Singapore / ArtScience Museum.