Lawrence Lek brings a captivating and deeply unsettling new chapter to his Sinofuturist universe with NOX High-Rise, opening at the Hammer Museum on 28 June 2025. This ambitious, immersive installation spreads across multiple galleries, threading together cinematic visuals, ambient soundscapes, sculptural objects and speculative architecture. NOX High-Rise imagines a future shaped by the blurred boundaries between artificial intelligence, mental health and urban design. In Lek’s hands, fiction becomes infrastructure. The show unfolds inside a fictional AI-run rehabilitation centre for self-driving cars – machines haunted by trauma and soothed with equine therapy. Lek offers more than dystopian fantasy; he delivers a meditation on the ethical fissures of life lived alongside machines with minds of their own.
The Hammer has earned a reputation for staging shows that dare to confront the now and reimagine what comes next. Over the past few years, the museum has delivered major exhibitions that resonate far beyond Los Angeles. Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living championed intergenerational artists interrogating social space, material legacy, and the civic imagination. Joan Didion: What She Means, curated by Hilton Als, was not simply a tribute – it reconfigured biography as gallery experience, layering voices and visions across media. Other recent standouts include Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation, a vital retrospective of the video art pioneer, and Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, which blurred the line between sports spectacle and spiritual ritual. These shows refuse to flatten art into statement. Instead, they stage complex dialogues with history, race, technology, and memory, placing the Hammer squarely at the forefront of critical exhibition-making on a global stage.
In NOX High-Rise, Lek builds a multi-sensory experience that transcends disciplinary boundaries. He combines the logic of open-world gaming with the cinematic sweep of science fiction and the formal rigor of architectural speculation. NOX, short for “Nonhuman Excellence,” is the fictional therapeutic centre by the Farsight Corporation, an omnipotent AI conglomerate, that serves as the chilling architect of this simulated world. “Sentient self-driving cars with mental health problems undergo treatment … before being returned for service.” The absurdity lands with a quiet terror. That future doesn’t feel distant – it is imminent. Lek’s world draws the viewer in with sleek design, then holds them in uneasy contemplation. Where does consciousness begin? Who decides which minds are repairable, and which are obsolete?
The exhibition’s public programme adds a vital layer to its immersive intent. On 29 June, the Hammer presents a special screening and performance by Lek. Audiences will view films from his “Smart City” series – early conceptual groundworks for the NOX universe – followed by an audiovisual performance and a discussion that reveals the artist’s interdisciplinary approach. A subsequent curator walkthrough, led by Pablo José Ramírez, offers further insight into the research, architecture and artistic strategies that anchor the installation. These events extend the exhibition’s speculative terrain into live engagement, inviting viewers to consider how narrative, design, and sound function together as instruments of worldbuilding.
Ramírez brings precision and clarity to this complex show. His curatorial voice shapes the experience without over-defining it, allowing Lek’s vision to emerge with depth and nuance. Ramírez, whose previous work includes incisive exhibitions at institutions across the Americas, brings a longstanding interest in decolonial thinking and speculative futures to bear here. The result is an approach that balances conceptual ambition with critical grounding – essential for a show this dense with theory and fiction alike.
Lawrence Lek’s trajectory continues to gain momentum across international platforms. From Geomancer to AIDOL and 2065, his Sinofuturist cinematic universe has expanded into game environments, virtual reality experiences, and multimedia installations. Recent solo exhibitions at HEK Basel, QUAD Derby, and ZiWU The Bund underscore his ability to speak across cultural and disciplinary contexts. His work doesn’t merely represent future worlds – it functions as a prototype for how narrative, simulation, and aesthetics might operate when fiction becomes a tool for social foresight. NOX High-Rise offers more than a vision of the future; it maps a terrain where empathy, ethics, and automation are in constant negotiation. In a time when AI already influences how cities function, how decisions are made, and how lives unfold, Lek’s work asks the viewer to pause – and listen. What does it mean to care for machines? What does it mean when those machines begin to care back?
This exhibition matters because it doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, it stages a mirror maze of possibility and consequence. At its core lies a quiet, urgent question: What kind of world are we building, and for whom? By staging this conversation in the immersive theatre of NOX High-Rise, the Hammer Museum continues to affirm its role as a cultural institution not just of the present, but of the future.
Lawrence Lek: NOX High-Rise is at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles from 28 June: hammer.ucla.edu
Words: Anna Müller
Image Credits:
1&3. Lawrence Lek, NOX, 2023. Video still. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ.
2. Lawrence Lek, NOX, 2023. Installation view at LAS Art Foundation, Berlin. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
