Lam Pok Yin’s An Increasingly Difficult and Futile Task (2021) is currently on view in Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong. The exhibition serves as the first chapter of Tai Kwun Contemporary’s flagship series Stay Connected: Art and China Since 2008, presenting twenty-first century art that explores social changes in China and their global impact. Focusing on the widespread use of the Internet and digital technologies, the show traces the evolution of contemporary artistic practices alongside societal transformations. The exhibition runs from 26 September 2025 to 4 January 2026.

An Increasingly Difficult and Futile Task (2021) investigates the presence and invisibility of human labour in the digital age. As a crowdsourcing platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) prohibits the use of automated programs or bots to perform tasks independently. This prompted the artist to ask: how can we prove to others across the internet that we are truly human rather than machines? He created a task on MTurk inviting workers to submit evidence of their humanity—either traits that distinguish them from machines or elements that make them feel human. Images, videos, and voice recordings submitted by over 800 participants were loaded onto multiple obsolete mobile phones for continuous playback. The devices were displayed in glass vessels on wall-mounted shelves, resembling a cabinet of curiosities from a distance. The work critiques the efficiency-driven logic of outsourcing repetitive, low-paid tasks to humans rather than machines, while revealing the hidden reality of low-cost digital labourers.

Lam Pok Yin (b.1988, Hong Kong) maintains a constant interest in where technology, media and people intersect. His recent artistic practice has shifted towards platforms, mechanisms, and logics related to digital technologies and the data they generate, as well as the underlying labour relations. He engages with the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform in a dual capacity: both as a worker, personally experiencing the fragmented and de-subjectivised nature of micro-labour, and as a task designer and employer, issuing instructions and commissioning anonymous workers to produce images, texts, and sounds. These materials are then selected, arranged, and contextualised, ultimately transformed into installations, videos, and text-based works. As the works are produced within the platform itself, they inherently address, and must confront, questions concerning the value of labour, the power relations embedded in technological platforms, and the entanglements between artistic production and exploitation.