Woaw Gallery and Case Studyo are pleased to present the works of Sun Woo, Canadian artist of South Korean origin. You Have a New Memory is her first solo exhibition in Hong Kong and with the gallery and production team. Alternating between canvas and digital screen, Sun Woo’s practice has engaged with today’s image culture and the contemporary psyche reflected in humanity’s interaction with commodified technologies.

With her new body of works, the artist extends her focus to digitized memory. In an age where technical machines have become a boundless repository for both personal and collective histories, memory is no longer a process of constant recollection and reconstruction but rather a file that can instantly be retrieved, ready to be played back over and over. The latest features in our devices periodically remind us of selected moments from the archives, curated based on personalized algorithm, eroding temporal distance and taking part in our decision of what to remember and what to forget. These archives—an entanglement of personal and public data—further go on to blur the schism between individual and communal history, often producing vivid flashbacks of events or emotions that derive not from our lived experience, but from that of others. As such digitized memories complement the limits of the human body, we are left to wonder which past is worthy of remembrance, how much agency we have over the selection process, whether these phantom memories impact our identity construction, and where to draw the line between our bodies and our prosthetic enhancements.

Gallery address: 9 Queen's Road Central, Central