Nepenthe (Summer Palace Ruins)

Nepenthe is an on-going series of site-specific video game installations by Lawrence Lek, exploring memory, identity and escapism in immersive virtual worlds. Named after the ancient Greek remedy for sorrow, the works unfold in environments of uncanny escapism, set in futures of total automated entertainment.

For this iteration of Nepenthe (Summer Palace Ruins Edition), Lek was inspired by the ruined Da Shui Fa waterworks at Beijing’s Old Summer Palace — once considered the pinnacle of classical Chinese garden palace design. Destroyed during the Second Opium War by an Anglo-French force in 1860, the site lives on in the Nepenthe playable game as a virtual relic and sculptural neon replica: preserved within a fictional museum on a remote island, drifting somewhere between past and future.

Confronting the desolation of colonial conquest, Nepenthe, is home to several forgotten cultural monuments, salvaged from disrepair to live forever in this imagined, virtual world. The Nepenthe walkthrough short film follows a lone traveller who stumbles across the island and encounters the glowing remnants of lost civilisations — ghosts embedded in pristine virtual architecture.

First realised for the Ljubljana Biennale in 2021, Nepenthe imagines not only the architecture of immersive digital realms, but the emotional cultures and coping mechanisms that grow within them. Seductive and unsettling in equal measure.

Lawrence Lek is a London-based filmmaker, musician and artist whose work spans architecture, gaming, video, music and speculative fiction. He is internationally recognised for advancing the concept of Sinofuturism through immersive installations that explore spiritual and existential themes through the lens of science fiction. Named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in AI and winner of the 2024 Frieze Artist Award, Lek continues to expand a cinematic universe where technology, emotion and simulation converge.