Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours) (2015)

Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours) uses video game software to imagine a future in which the Royal Academy of Arts in London has been sold to a Chinese billionaire as a luxury private mansion. A first-person perspective tour through their new abode is accompanied by a voiceover – translated from the high-society Tatler magazine into Mandarin – about how to hire and fire an 'army of household staff'. Drawing from the language of high-definition property marketing videos, the project presents a critical look at the capital's current housing crisis. The Royal Academy is itself on a rental contract from the government, and this fact shows the precarious status of even the nation's oldest and most revered art establishment. This is an uncannily familiar virtual world where a major cultural institution has been appropriated into commercial real estate. The work forms Chapter 9 of Lawrence Lek’s Bonus Levels project, a series of utopian/dystopian virtual worlds based on real places.