Light Trace: Scanned Memories explores how images are preserved, transformed, and cared for in a constantly updating digital environment. Using a home-use document scanner as both a slit-camera and a brush of light, the work records motion, delay, and glare across an iPad screen mirroring a computer-based digital sculpture process. The resulting bands and distortions are not accidental glitches, but traces of time, attention, and technological mediation made visible.
Title: Light Trace: Scanned Memories / 《讀光:掃描記憶》
Artist: Wong Chun Sunny / 王浚
Year: 2024
Medium: Scenography Digital Print / 文件掃描影像數碼輸出
Size: 80 × 100 cm
This work begins with a simple but altered gesture: dragging a document scanner across an iPad screen. Instead of scanning a static document, the scanner captures a live, mirrored display of a computer-based digital sculpture process. In doing so, it compresses multiple temporalities into a single image: screen time, hand movement, software processing, and print output.
The image bands are guided by a machine-learning visual score derived from digitised study notes and ECG traces, processed through word-embedding methods. These lines are therefore not random graphic effects, but structured marks shaped by learning, bodily data, and computational translation.
At its core, Light Trace: Scanned Memories asks how identity and memory persist when images no longer live in stable, fixed forms, but instead move across devices, interfaces, and updates. What remains is not a perfect copy, but a trace of care.
Capturing Digital Memory
At the centre of Scanned Memories is the use of a scanner to record unstable digital images shown on an iPad. Rather than preserving a fixed picture, the process captures movement, delay, and distortion, revealing how memory is mediated through technology. The scanned image becomes a trace of a shifting encounter between screen, machine, and hand, reflecting a contemporary condition in which identity is continuously shaped by digital systems as much as by lived experience.
Metaphors of Memory
The distortions within the work are not simply visual effects, but metaphors for the way memory operates. Fragmented lines, interruptions, and blurred passages evoke how recollection is partial, unstable, and constantly re-formed by outside forces. Each scan suggests that memory is neither fully permanent nor entirely fleeting; instead, it exists in tension between preservation and disappearance. Through this process, the work invites viewers to reflect on how identity and remembrance are continually rewritten in a technology-saturated world.
Collect Hong Kong Art Fair 2026 will take place from 21 to 29 March 2026 at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, bringing together 450+ exhibited artworks across ceramics, installation, painting, photography, sculpture, and video. Presented across multiple gallery spaces in the Arts Centre, the fair offers a major platform for Hong Kong artists and a wide-ranging snapshot of the city’s contemporary art scene.