SUN WOO
A Castle Made of Sand 
November 12 – December 12, 2021

 ATM gallery NYC is pleased to present A Castle Made of Sand, Sun Woo’s inaugural New York solo show featuring eight new works. Integrating digital tools with traditional approaches, Woo’s paintings explore themes of consumption, identity, memory, and contemporary psyche as reflected in humanity’s interaction with commodified technologies. 

In this exhibition, Woo focuses on the migration of digital images. These images consistently come and go, traveling along a networked trail until they reach a temporary stop. Like nomads without a fixed dwelling, they settle briefly inside an unknown screen or device only to set off again for their next destination. They may linger for a while in our field of vision, but they may just as well drift away in an instant. 

The works featured in this show ground themselves on such movement, transience, and volatility. Taking migrating images that roam the cybernetic sphere, Woo adds weight to and anchors the phantom bodies that slip and slide endlessly. Her paintings and sculptures freeze or fossilize these images and objects in transit—and oftentimes, fleeting moments or memories that pass us by just as easily—constructing virtual environments and providing physical settings for them to dwell in. At times, they also allude to situations in which familiar or everyday movements are estranged, disrupted or put on halt, as well as remnants of passing presence and flashbacks. Even so, these nomadic bodies may still go on to resume their venture someplace else, or in another user or a viewer’s device. Like a castle made of sand, they may sit next to us for a while only to scatter away with the next gust of wind.

Sun Woo (b. 1994 Seoul, South Korea) received her BA in Visual Art at Columbia University in the City of New York in 2017. Her works have been exhibited in galleries and art spaces including Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2020); Fragment Gallery, Moscow (2021); Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong (2021); Cylinder, Seoul (2021); Harlesden High Street, London (2020); P21, Seoul (2020); 2/W Weekend, Seoul (2018); among others.