By Jessica Ye (Jessica Yap)
What if a machine could dance? Better still, what if it could learn to dance, get the steps wrong and try again? This is one of the curious encounters waiting at Hong Kong-based artist Lau Wai’s ‘After Intelligence’, a solo exhibition at de Sarthe from 5 to 25 September 2026, where five video works and a single-player game take us into a rather strange world of humans being trained by AI while AI learns to behave like us.
The journey begins in an office, although it is not quite the office you might expect. In The Morphing (2026), the screen holds a wide shot of workers sitting at identical desks, with only their legs and the lower halves of their bodies visible. There are no faces and no personalities to distinguish one worker from another, until an argument breaks out and Wai suddenly appears on screen. Embarrassed by what has happened and anxious about her position at work, she takes a colleague’s advice and signs up for a “Human to AI” training course. The catch? The course does not merely teach her how to work alongside AI. It digitises her.
From there, things get even more interesting. Lau introduces several versions of Wai, known as W.A.I., in The Cast of the Proxy (2026), where these digital replicas are learning to do things that we would normally consider perfectly human. They run, clean, dance and even perform kung fu, with their movements taken from motion data recorded from actual robot footage. Some of them get it terribly wrong, stumbling through their movements before trying again, and that is perhaps what makes these works so enjoyable to watch. The mistakes are not there simply for laughs. They show us a machine learning in much the same way we do, through repetition and plenty of getting things wrong along the way.
But then there is the slightly uncomfortable part. If a machine can eventually learn to clean, dance and perform kung fu, where do we draw the line? Cleaning is one thing, but dancing is hardly a chore, and kung fu has never exactly been something we associate with artificial intelligence. Lau leaves us to wonder how much of our everyday lives we are willing to hand over, and whether there will eventually be anything left that belongs entirely to us.
The final installation takes the idea one step further by putting the decision in the hands of the visitor. In the single-player video game, you take control of Wai and decide what happens to her. Depending on how you play, she can return to the physical world or remain in the digital realm, becoming another W.A.I. It is a rather simple premise, but one that suddenly makes the visitor part of Lau’s story rather than someone merely standing outside looking in.
The exhibition grew out of Lau’s earlier interest in motion-capture performers, people whose bodies are used to become someone or something else. During her de Sarthe Artist Residency, that idea shifted from one body taking on another to something much closer to the technology surrounding us now: AI learning from human behaviour, while humans are being encouraged to become more efficient, more adaptable and perhaps a little more machine-like themselves.
‘After Intelligence’ does not present this as some distant science-fiction scenario. There is an office, a digital woman, a few machines attempting to dance and a game in which someone has to decide whether Wai should remain human. And perhaps that is what makes the exhibition worth playing through rather than simply walking past. Lau has taken a question about AI and given it a face we can recognise, a body we can control and, ultimately, a decision we have to make ourselves.
So, what would you do with Wai?
‘After Intelligence’ runs from 5 to 25 September 2026 at de Sarthe, 2/F, Block A, Vita Tower – 29 Wong Chuk Hang Rdoad – Wong Chuk Hang.
