Arts | ‘I upload therefore I exist’ opens today

The exhibition “I upload therefore I exist” by Wong Weng Io will open today at 6.30 p.m. at Casa Garden.

Wong Weng Io (Yoyo) was born in Macau in 1993. She finished Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) with First Class Honours at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. She is now based in Macau and was selected by Babel Cultural Organization for New Visions 2018, a program designed to identify and promote young artists.

Curated by Margarida Saraiva, the exhibition presents large scale artwork installations, titled “The Omnipresence of Text”, “The Omnipresence of Images”, “The Omnipresence of Complex” and “Past”.

“The Omnipresence of Text” is inspired by the Ether, a science fiction novel set in the United States, written by Zhang Ran, a Chinese author born in 1981. In the setting of a future society, free-thinking citizens find no other space other than sign language to express their views due to omnipresence of surveillance. Wong Weng Io uses quotes from the novel, printed in hundreds of small papers, the text partially blocked by a black marker.

As the spectator walks inside the gallery, the artist explores “The Omnipresence of Images”. In the second room of the Casa Garden, walls are covered with 1200 postcards with images belonging to three different categories: “The World”, “Humans” and “Rubbish”. All the images were transformed into postcards, displayed along very long shelves, geometrically, rigorously and systematically organized.

The third room presents “The Omnipresence of Complex”, composed of one hundred screens in a dark room. On the screens, selected quotes from robots questioning humans appear, such as “How do you know you are human?” or “Are you real? Am I real?” or even responses to questions about the future.

The last room addresses the question of time, memory, personal data and change. An artwork titled “Past”, features all the personal data and memories of the artist’s last 2000 days of life. The past becomes a pile of worthless different “containers” of information analogous to sound tapes, impossible to access due to technological progress.