After Intelligence

DE SARTHE is pleased to present After ‘Intelligence’, a solo exhibition by Hong Kong-based artist Lau Wai, on view from 5 to 25 September 2026. Five video works together with a single-player video game across three installations chart a closed loop in which humans undergo AI training while AI learns to mimic humans, landing on a question that has become unavoidable: what defines the human in this digital age? At the center of that narrative is Wai, a digital avatar Lau built by motion and facial capture. Wai begins as an office worker who signs up for a “Human to AI” training course to stay competitive, and is digitized in the process. The exhibition concludes the ninth annual de Sarthe Artist Residency (deSAR).

Lau arrived at the residency intending to return to an earlier body of work about motion-capture actors, performers who spend their careers inhabiting other bodies, and who risk losing the sense of where their own ends. Over the course of the residency, that question expanded. The identity crisis Lau found more urgent was no longer the loss of self to another person’s movement, but the arrival of a rival intelligence.“What will be the ultimate role of humans as AI technology progresses?” — Lau WaiThe exhibition is staged across separate spaces and moves in one direction: out of a world that looks like ours and into the one that has replaced it.Inside the first space, The Morphing (2026) opens onto a world close enough to ours to pass for it. For a full minute, the camera holds a wide shot showing only the lower halves of office workers at identical desks, no faces, no distinguishing marks, a workplace with the individuals edited out. The order breaks when an argument erupts, and the frame finally cuts to a face: Wai, visibly embarrassed by the dispute. Anxious about her standing at work, Wai follows a colleague’s recommendation for a “Human to AI” training course, offered as a human optimization akin to a system upgrade. She takes it. It digitizes her, and the digital realm does not let her back out. If efficiency defines “better” in this age, and machines are held to be the more rational and reliable party, is humanity on an inevitable trajectory to live like AI?In the second space, four video works from The Cast of the Proxy series (2026) project one or more replicas of Wai, each designated W.A.I. The replicas are learning to do human things: to run, to clean, to dance, to perform kung fu. Their movements are not animated by hand but drawn from motion data recorded from actual robot footages, which pulls the works closer to documentary than to fiction, machine learning as it really looks, staged.Several of the replicas fail. The failures are not played for comedy or for defeat; in machine learning, a failed attempt is the method rather than the exception, and the videos treat these replicas’ eventual success as a matter of when rather than if. What is being handed over here is not only drudgery. Dancing and kung fu are not chores. These rooms leave open which tasks we are prepared to delegate, and what, if anything, is not ours to give.In the last of the spaces, the final work turns the visitor from observer into participant. It is a single-player game, and the player controls Wai. Depending on how it is played, Wai returns to the physical world or is absorbed completely, becoming another W.A.I. Here, the exhibition’s question stops being rhetorical. Someone has to decide what becomes of Wai, and for now, that someone is human. By granting the audience this power, the work forces a direct confrontation with the artist’s inquiry from the beginning: what will be the ultimate role of humans?