Guanyin II: The Caretaker, Lawrence Lek

Lawrence Lek is showing Guanyin II: The Caretaker at the V&A East Storehouse from Saturday 18 April to Thursday 29 October 2026. It's a new commission for the museum's New Work programme, and rather than something you just stand and look at, it's an interactive game you play.

The game is set inside a reconstruction of the gallery's own conservation studio. You take control of a 'carebot' called Guanyin, named after the Buddhist goddess of compassion, and your job is to search for fragments of a model of the ArcelorMittal Orbit—the public sculpture created for the Olympic Park. As the bot gathers clues about its work and starts accessing staff-only areas of the Storehouse, the boundary between labour and play begins to blur. It's a small, focused premise that opens up into something larger as you poke around.

Lek is a London-based Malaysian Chinese artist, filmmaker, musician and game designer who builds and films entire worlds inside real-time video game engines. He draws on architecture and electronic music to explore spiritual and existential themes through speculative fiction, and his work usually sits in a 'Sinofuturist' world where advanced technology has become mundane and populated by alienated figures. Guanyin II fits right into that: a robot doing a repetitive, care-based job in a futuristic version of a museum workshop.

The commission is part of the Making East London series, which looks at east London as a site of global influence, recovery, cross-cultural exchange and creative production. You'll find it in Gallery 1 of the V&A East Storehouse, on Parkes Street in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Hackney Wick, E20 3AX. It's open 10.00 to 17.30, and entry is free.