Screening from the LUX Collection: ‘This ending will make sense in time’

Presented in collaboration with LUX Collection and alongside Marcos Kueh’s solo exhibition ‘Smooth Sailing, 一路順風’ at esea contemporary, this screening features artist’s moving image works that imagine futures made possible through acts of re-telling.

Stories do not always arrive whole. At times, they emerge in fragments, scattered by historical accounts and migration trajectories. At other times, they end abruptly, leaving only traces of what might have been. By transforming these gaps into spaces for new narratives, these moving images in this programme ask how reclaiming what is missing might reshape our sense of self and possibility.

In ‘Black Cloud’ by Lawrence Lek, a lone surveillance AI searches for its own desire in the ruins of a smart city, guided by a caretaking AI Guanyin. Michelle Williams Gamaker’s ‘Thieves’ stages a fictional act of revenge, where Anna May Wong and Sabu reclaim the roles denied to them in Hollywood’s past. In ‘Early Years’ by Morgan Quaintance, Barbara Samuels recallsher beginnings and creative life in London, where selfhood is shaped through continual departures and arrivals.

The programme will be introduced by Sun Park, Programme and Communications Manager at LUX and is presented as part of esea ArtClub, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Booking is essential, as spaces are limited.

Programme

Lawrence Lek, ‘Black Cloud’, 2021 (11 min)
Set in an unspecified near future, ‘Black Cloud’ follows a lone surveillance AI as they confront their existential crisis while watching over the streets of the abandoned smart city of SimBeijing. Left with nothing to do, but still obliged to perform their endless tasks, the AI discusses their troubles with their built-in therapist — a self-help AI called Guanyin. Not all is as it seems in the smart city. Originally built as a replica of the Chinese capital to test autonomous vehicles, SimBeijing has mysteriously become a ghost town. As Black Cloud gradually opens up to Guanyin, they reveal the darker reasons behind why the city has been abandoned. ‘Black Cloud’ is the first part of Lek’s ‘Smart City’ trilogy of CGI noir, followed by ‘NOX’ (2023) and ‘Empty Rider’ (2024). The series continues Lek’s ongoing Sinofuturist universe, an interwoven series of animated films and video games that explore questions of identity, agency, and emotion in the age of AI.

Michelle Williams Gamaker, ‘Thieves’, 2023 (27 min)
In the second instalment of Critical Affection Trilogy, and Williams Gamaker’s first film in Fictional Revenge, Thieves is a fantasy adventure retelling of the 1924 black-and-white and 1940 Technicolor versions of 'The Thief of Bagdad'. Williams Gamaker reimagines the films’ marginalised characters, Chinese-American actor Anna May Wong and Indian-born American actor Sabu claiming leading roles in her film, uniting as fictional allies, to challenge the racial discrimination of the film industry. Told as a movie within a movie, in Thieves, Anna May Wong is found on set by Sabu, but there is something wrong: she is in black-and-white while everything else is in Technicolor, and both find themselves trapped in their screen-images. Both must navigate the structural violence on set with the help of the Annamaytons and Silver Maiden (in this case, the casting of white actors to replace actors of colour) by joining forces to overthrow the set and those in charge.

Morgan Quaintance, ‘Early Years’, 2019 (15 min)
‘Early Years’ is a portrait of Jamaican-born artistic polymath Barbara Samuels. It features an account of her first generation, diasporic experience in London, and her discovery of the liberatory possibilities for self-actualisation offered by an early entry into creative life.

About LUX Collection

The LUX collection is the UK’s largest collection of artists’ moving image by more than 1000 international artists, with over 6,000 works dating from the 1920s to the present, and it continues to grow with the addition of new works by contemporary artists and restorations of historic works. The collection is available for loan for screenings and exhibitions in the UK and internationally. Many of these can be viewed in the LUX library for research purposes.

LUX is an arts organisation that supports and promotes visual artists working with the moving image.

Founded in 2002 as a charity and not-for-profit limited company, the organisation builds on a long lineage of predecessors (The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, London Video Arts and The Lux Centre) which stretch back to the 1960s.

Image credits

1.Production still from Thieves, by Michelle Williams Gamaker. 2023. Digital video, duration 27 minutes 27 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.

2-3. 'Black Cloud' by Lawrence Lek, 2021.

4-5. 'Thieves', by Michelle Williams Gamaker. 2023.

6-7. 'Early Years' by Morgan Quaintance, 2019.

About esea contemporary

esea contemporary is the UK’s only non-profit art centre specialising in presenting and platforming artists and art practices that identify with and are informed by East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) cultural backgrounds.

esea contemporary is situated in an award-winning building in the heart of Manchester, home to one of the largest East Asian populations in the UK. Since its inauguration as a community-oriented visual arts festival in 1986, esea contemporary – previously named Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art – has continuously evolved to establish itself as a dynamic and engaging space for cross-cultural exchanges in the British art scene, as well as in a global context.

esea contemporary aims to increase the visibility of contemporary art practices from the East and Southeast Asian communities and their diasporas. It is a site for forward-thinking art programmes that beyond exhibitions also include commissions, research, residencies, publishing, and a wide range of vibrant public events. esea contemporary values creativity, compassion, interconnectedness, and collectivity in implementing its mission.

Photo by Joe Smith.

About Lawrence Lek

Lawrence Lek is an artist, filmmaker, and musician who unifies diverse practices — architecture, gaming, video, music and fiction — into a continuously expanding cinematic universe. Over the last decade, Lek has incorporated vernacular media of his generation, such as video games and computer-generated animation, into site-specific installations and digital environments, which he describes as 'three-dimensional collages of found objects and situations.' Often featuring interlocking narratives and the recurring figure of the wanderer, his work explores the myth of technological progress in an age of social change. London-based Lek is best known for advancing the concept of Sinofuturism with immersive installations that explore spiritual and existential themes through the lens of science fiction. Winner of the 2024 Frieze Artist Award, he was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in AI. Lek is represented by Sadie Coles HQ.

About Michelle Williams Gamaker

Michelle Williams Gamaker is a London-based artist filmmaker. Through an interrogation of cinema and its artifice, she proposes critical alternatives to colonial and imperialist storytelling in early 20th-century British and Hollywood studio films. Leaning into the magic of cinema, Williams Gamaker explores cinema history by using the tools of cinema against itself to sabotage the casting process and recasts characters as fictional activists.

Since 2014, Williams Gamaker has been developing Fictional Activism, including her 'Dissolution' Trilogy (2017-19) and 'The Bang Straws' (2021), which received special commendation by the Jury of the 65th BFI London Film Festival and won Best Experimental Short for the Aesthetica Short Film Festival (ASFF) 2021. Williams Gamaker’s 2022 Film London Production Award enabled her first film in Fictional Revenge: 'Thieves' (2023) which premiered at her solo exhibition 'Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass' at South London Gallery, touring to Dundee Contemporary Arts and Bluecoat, Liverpool (2023-24). 'Thieves' also won ASFF’s Best Experimental Film in 2023. Her recent film Oberon (2023), commissioned by BFI for Powell and Pressburger will be followed by 'Strange Evidence' (2025) which will complete Williams Gamaker’s 'Critical Affection' trilogy.

Williams Gamaker’s work has featured in BFI FLARE LGBTQ+ Film Festival (2017) and BFI’s LFF Experimenta programme (2018, 2021), while her 'Dissolution' trilogy (2017-2019), comprising 'House of Women' (2017), 'The Fruit is There to be Eaten' (2018) and 'The Eternal Return' (2019) contributed to her jointly winning Film London’s Jarman Award in 2020. Her work is in the Arts Council Collection, and her entire filmography will also be part of the British Film Institute’s National Collection in 2024.

Williams Gamaker is developing her first feature, 'Majestic City' with screenwriter Elan Gamaker and producers Samm Haillay and Sophie Mathisen. She is a Reader in Fine Art, Goldsmiths University and is also a British Academy Wolfson Fellow (2022-2025).

About Morgan Quaintanence

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami.

His practice remains open and responsive to contemporary experience and so largely eschews the rehearsal of set themes. However, interests in the human condition, the cultic milieu, counterculture, ethnography, the built environment, Afro-Caribbean, African American, East Asian, and British histories are all mainstays.

He was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. He was the 2023 IFFR Short Film Nominee for the European Film Awards; the recipient of the 2022 ARTE Award at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg; in 2021, the Best Documentary Short Film Award at Tacoma Film Festival, USA; the Explora Award at Curtocircuito International Film Festival, Santiago de Compostela; the UK Short Film Award at Open City Documentary Film Festival, London, the Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, and the Best Experimental Film Award at Curtas Vila do Conde, Portugal; in 2020, the New Vision Award at CPH:DOX, Denmark and the Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conde, Portugal .

Over the past fourteen years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics, and their socio-political contexts have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, the Guardian, numerous others that it’ll be too boring to list here, and helped shape and influence the UK’s new landscape of progressive cultural discourse and debate.