Installation view of Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began at LACMA, 2025–26.
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.
As the year comes to a close, Artlab’s Editors consider the generative bounties that emerge from periods of prolonged artistic incubation, reflection, and research.
Today’s world, inundated with image spam, algorithms built around pushing “for you” content, and an ever-multiplying network of accessible digital archives, artists are faced less with a lack of inspiration than a shortage of time and attention. As such, the evergreen resources of time and space have become all the more valuable.
Through residencies, fellowships, workshops, or economic resources, initiatives that allow artists to experience periods of incubation lead to some of the most vital, prescient work being made today.
This understanding is at the forefront of Hyundai Artlab’s mission and is evident in many of its programs. Whether it be Digital Commissions, the VH AWARD, the Art + Technology Lab as part of the Hyundai Project at LACMA, Hyundai Blue Prize+, or the Artlab Editorial Fellowship, our programs reflect the high priority we place on incubation in the realization of new work from artists, writers, and curators, alike.
Lawrence Lek, Black Cloud (2021–23), video, video game, installation.
Installation at Sadie Coles HQ (2023).
Lawrence Lek’s 2021 film Black Cloud is one such example. It was developed as part of the fourth VH AWARD, a program that supports emerging media artists who engage with the context of Asia through an online residency program in collaboration with Eyebeam, a grant of $25,000 awarded to five finalists, and global exhibition opportunities. As that year’s Grand Prix recipient, Lek was awarded an additional $25,000. This funding, in addition to the close mentorship and workshops provided through the VH AWARD program, allowed Lek to further pursue the themes explored in Black Cloud into his widely renowned “Smart City Saga” trilogy, which include NOX (2023) and Empty Rider (2024).
In her essay “The Author as Architect: Lawrence Lek’s Scripted Worlds,” the 2025 Artlab Editorial Fellow Elvia Wilk stitches this connection between Lek’s writing process and the generative conditions of incubation periods. “His evolving approach to scriptwriting is both programmatic (organizing story structure, conveying plot, shaping compelling characters) and liberatory, allowing a space for play, experimentation, and feedback,” writes Wilk.
Addressing the methods with which Lek preemptively stages both his own personal endeavors and larger systemic, world-building inquiries, be it through the introduction of fictional artists in his Bonus Level series (2013-16) or his exhibitions which often include “immersive speculative spaces that juxtapose narrative storytelling with open-world games,” Wilk also points to the settings of reclusion intrinsic to Lek’s practice. Rather than rehearsing ontological concerns in highly populated, physical, or even human worlds, Lek briefly suspends the conditions of immanent reality, allowing his subjects, much like therapy patients, the space and time to reflect, discuss, and unfurl ideas and experiences both painfully conscious and undetectably latent.
As it happens, this essay was also developed within the incubatory program of the Artlab Editorial Fellowship, which grants two writers $10,000 to develop three essays throughout the course of the year. With one-on-one mentorship provided by some of the world’s most esteemed art writers, fellows are provided the financial means, guidance, and space to hone in on a specific aspect of contemporary artistic production.
“To have an opportunity on a global scale and which is sustained over the course of a year is very, very rare,” said 2025 Artlab Editorial Advisor Rahel Aima in a roundtable conversation with co-advisor, Orit Gat, and Artlab Editor, Shannon Lee. “It’s permission to try stuff out,” she continued. “Getting to have a one-on-one relationship with an editor and advisors who aren’t trying to give you the sense that they could have done it better than you is so valuable.” This year, Artlab Editorial Fellows Elvia Wilk and Jiaying Sim took the opportunity to expand their art writing practices. While both sought to reveal the hidden infrastructures undergirding contemporary visual art, Wilk zeroed in on how scripts manifest within specific artistic practices. Sim, meanwhile, unpacked different methods of engagement—labor, materiality, multisensory experiences—and how those are employed by artists in Singapore.
Coming from a background in cinema theory, Sim was particularly interested in using the fellowship to explore new forms of writing outside of academia. “It gave me an opportunity to articulate these ideas that were often only related to film; I’m really thankful for the opportunity to engage with these questions,” she said.
Incubation catalyzes not only enduring questions, methods, or formal concerns within artist practices. It also has the capacity to engender serendipitous returns and sustainable relationships between institutions and artists. Upon receiving a grant from the LACMA’s Hyundai-partnered Art + Technology Lab in 2014, Tavares Strachan created a nanosatellite in collaboration with SpaceX. Launched in 2018, ENOCH, which featured a sculpture of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American selected as an astronaut for a NASA program, orbited the Earth for three years before its return.
Tavares Strachan, Robert, 2018, © Tavares Strachan, 58th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, May You Live in Interesting Times.
Courtesy of the artist, photo and video by Andrea D'altoè Neonlauro.
This fall, Strachan’s work returned to LACMA for his first museum exhibition in Los Angeles. On view through March 2026, “The Day Tomorrow Began” follows the artist’s interests in the history of science, the politics of visibility, and the power of re-representation across sculpture, painting, text, and sound. Strachan’s Robert (2018) directly complements ENOCH, fashioning an alternative portrait of Lawrence from a glass frame illuminated by an internal, anatomical network of tubes and argon. “For me it’s important to ensure that when someone has done something incredible, that the level of storytelling is aligned with the nature of the act, hence the audacity of putting an object into space and trying to get his energy back into the cosmos,” Strachan explained Strachan explained during a recent exhibition tour.
This cycle of incubation, growth, and return can be found in the paths of many artists who have worked with Artlab over the past decade. For American Artist, who was another Art + Technology Lab grant recipient in 2021 the artist’s project Collective Head [object Object] became the jumping-off point for what has since become a long-term engagement with the work of science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Working in collaboration with Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Artist constructed speculative sculptures, installations, and videos that re-present Butler’s work and life in Pasadena and the neighboring advancements in rocketry as overlapping, if not somewhat symbiotic phenomena. In an Artlab essay on Artist’s The Monophobic Response (2024), collaborator and founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network Dr. Ayana Jameson writes, “By merging these quotidian signifiers of life in Pasadena as observed by both Butler and Artist… Artist reveals the ways in which Butler’s speculative fictions were rooted directly in the world around her.”
American Artist, Installation view of Shaper of God at REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA, Image courtesy of the artist; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; and REDCAT, Los Angeles.
Photo by Brica Wilcox.
These works culminated in “Shaper of God,” a solo exhibition by Artist that took place at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works in 2025. Ahead of the show’s opening, the artist discussed some of their work’s most critical themes and processes in an Artlab Editorial film.
This process of incubation is not only critical for artists—it is equally important for curators. To that end, Hyundai Blue Prize+ invites emerging curators worldwide to explore some of today’s most pressing issues, providing financial support, mentorship, and the opportunity to develop and showcase their work at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing. Originally launched to cultivate curators in China and Korea, this year, Hyundai Blue Prize+ expanded its open call to include curators from anywhere in the world working in the context of Asia. As curatorial practices evolve to reflect the rapid shifts in our contemporary cultural landscape, Hyundai Blue Prize+ functions as a laboratory for curators to challenge conventions and embrace diverse perspectives.
Within each award cycle, five finalists are selected from a global open call by a jury panel of esteemed experts. These finalists are each provided a $4,000 grant to develop their exhibition proposals, with one-on-one mentorship from panel members and a research tour to China. From these five, two final awardees are chosen to show their exhibitions at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, receiving 800,000 RMB for exhibition production and additional support.
Recently, two pairs of curators were selected as the awardees for 2025: Hyejin Park and Yoonyoung Park, and Yifeng Wei and Penny Dan Xu. Over the course of nearly two years from the initial open call, these curators will be provided with the resources to incubate their projects, allowing for evolutions and permutations as their research develops. In addition to receiving an opportunity to realize their own exhibitions, Hyundai Blue Prize+ also provides support by assisting in all practical aspects of the exhibition—from researching and reaching out to artists, sending invitations, designing the space, coordinating with vendors, overseeing installation, and planning the media preview and opening event.
Film Still From Artlab Editorial presents American Artist: Earthseed, 2024.
Courtesy of Hyundai Artlab.
As 2025 comes to an end, we are already looking forward to the ways in which we can nurture the blooms of artists, writers, and curators in the year ahead—and in the years to come. In addition to the opening of the two inaugural exhibitions of the Hyundai Translocal Series in New Delhi & Manchester, and Yongin & São Paulo next fall, we are excited to exhibit the commissioned work of the 6th VH AWARD’s five finalists at Singapore Art Week and to publish interviews with the curators awarded the Hyundai Blue Prize+ 2025 in January.
In a world rife with overstimulation, creation can feel like a luxury. That is why, here at Artlab, we are committed to protecting and nurturing the conditions of incubation, reflection, and experimentation that have occasioned the most necessary, prescient art.
