Depixelating History examines the intersection of technology and tradition in the Asian diaspora, deciphering how popular culture and heritage preservation converge in contemporary life.

An image is made up of countless pixels, just as history is built from personal stories and collective experiences that come into focus when pieced together. Centering on community memories and cultural identity, Depixelating History explores the possibility of digital technology in reactivating history and amplifying marginalized narratives, bridging tradition and modernity. The exhibition asks: How does technology shape our understanding of and connection to our cultural roots? How can digital tools be utilized to reimagine archives and foster new forms of placemaking?

Curated by Gladys Lou, Depixelating History features works by Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Ryan Park, and Linda Zhang, whose practices span 3D animation, augmented reality, digital photography, and sculptural installation. From an immersive journey through Toronto's Chinatown and illuminated convenience store sign boxes to augmented reality self-portraits inspired by Chinese opera masks, the exhibition illuminates the interconnected experiences of migration across cultures and time. Together, the selected works portray a speculative future in which technology and tradition evolve alongside one another.

Image credits
Poster Graphic Design: Hubert Swietorzecki
Poster Image: Chu Hua Catherine Dong, Skin Deep, 2018-2020, photograph with Augmented Reality. Image courtesy of the artist.
Background: Linda Zhang, Chinatown 2050, 2022, 18 minutes, short documentary film, Canada, United Kingdom; co-directed and co-produced by Linda Zhang, Maxim Gertler-Jaffe. Image courtesy of the artists.

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Depixelating History examines the intersection of technology and tradition within the Asian diaspora, considering how popular culture and heritage preservation converge in the contemporary world. The curatorial theme stemmed from my experience growing up in Hong Kong, a city in rapid development. Witnessing high-rise buildings seemingly go up overnight, Victoria Harbour shrinking through land reclamation, and stores changing constantly along the same streets reminds me of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s famous phrase, panta rhei (“everything flows”). The demolition of historical landmarks such as the Star Ferry Pier in Central, which sparked public protests in 2006, put me into deep thought about how, as cities modernize, sites of cultural memory can also disappear.

As digital technology becomes increasingly embedded in our lives, family dinners at a round table are replaced by video calls and WhatsApp groups, and celebrations like fireworks are experienced through livestreams and social media posts. Traditional practices and rituals risk being forgotten or replaced. It can seem as though technological advancement and traditional culture are opposing forces, and embracing one means giving up the other. But what if we think on the other side: can we utilize digital tools to reactivate and reimagine history? Depixelating History explores exactly this—the ways technology and tradition can coexist to create a mutually generative future, enabling collective memory to take on new forms and opening new possibilities for digital archiving and preservation.

An image is made up of countless pixels, just as history is built from personal stories and collective experiences that come into focus when pieced together. Through repeated transfers and compression, files can become downsized or corrupted, resulting in a loss of clarity and resolution—becoming “pixelated.” In my definition, “depixelating” is the process of restoring an image—of a place or a memory—bringing its details back to life. Depixelating History applies this logic to history, exploring how digital technology can reactivate overlooked historical moments and amplify marginalized narratives. By zooming into the individual “pixels” that together form broader experiences of the Asian diaspora, the exhibition considers how technology shapes our relationship to community and cultural identity, reflecting on the past and imagining futures that have yet to come.
The exhibition features work by Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Ryan Park, and Linda Zhang, whose practices range from 3D animation, augmented reality, digital photography, to sculptural installation. From an immersive journey through Toronto’s Chinatown and an illuminated Korean food market sign box to augmented reality self-portraits inspired by Chinese opera masks, Depixelating History explores how digital media can reimagine the archive and facilitate new forms of placemaking, revealing interconnected experiences of migration across cultures and time.

Ryan Park’s practice centres on business signage commonly found in Korean Canadian communities. His work in this show includes Mohkinstsis Hanguk Sikpum (Mohkinstsis Korean Foods), a commercial lightbox sign for a Korean food market, and Mohkinstsis Noraebang (Mohkinstsis Karaoke), a vinyl window sign referencing private karaoke rooms. The fluorescent sign-box design and graphic style reference the 1980s, when a wave of Korean immigrants arrived in Canada. The mackerel, radish, and other ingredients illustrated on the sign are familiar staples of Korean cooking, recalling the comfort and familiarity of home. Ethnic markets signal the presence of a growing community and provide access to food products from one’s homeland. Today, similar signs continue to appear on streets and in neighbourhoods. They welcome people from diverse backgrounds and have become sites of cultural exchange and appreciation.

Park made these two works specifically for Calgary, drawing on the complex history of language and land in Mohkinstsis, the Blackfoot name for Calgary. English became one of Canada’s official languages through a colonial process that suppressed Indigenous languages, most violently through the residential school system. For immigrants, language can also become a source of displacement as they navigate and assimilate into the dominant cultural and linguistic structures of a different country. Korean immigration itself is connected to histories of colonialism and Western Cold War politics, further complicating the relationship between migration and belonging.

Park responds to this history by imagining an alternate Calgary in which English did not become the dominant language and Blackfoot remained the primary language of the land. In this reversal, settlers—the English speakers—are expected to learn the local language. In Mohkinstsis Noraebang, English is identified by its Blackfoot name, Naapipowahsinni, alongside other languages offered at the karaoke establishment, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. By shifting the linguistic hierarchy of a familiar immigrant business sign, Park asks us to reconsider whose language gets to be recognized, adopted, and normalized. The works bring together two experiences of cultural displacement: the immigrant’s navigation of a new environment and the suppression of Indigenous language and culture, considering how different histories of migration and colonization intersect. The signs become a form of speculative placemaking, imagining an alternative world in which settlers take responsibility for learning from and listening to the communities already present on the land.
Skin Deep by Chun Hua Catherine Dong comprises five ID-card photographs of Dong’s face concealed beneath Chinese brocade silk fabrics, whose patterns merge with the backgrounds. An identification image is meant to establish an individual identity, but the mask obscures her features, reducing her to a generalized image of “Chineseness,” which reflects her experience of being seen primarily through her ethnicity as an immigrant. Through the masked portraits, Dong also reflects on the deeply ingrained feelings of shame and powerlessness that cause women to hold back, remain silent, and conform to societal expectations of femininity. Under these pressures, masking becomes both an act of concealment and a performance of the social and gender roles imposed upon women and immigrants.

When scanned with a phone or tablet through augmented reality, the static masks come alive with animated phoenixes, butterflies, peonies, and other animal and floral motifs inspired by Chinese folklore. Like a phoenix reborn from flames and ashes, Dong turns shame into a feminist strategy, reclaiming cultural symbols to assert women’s dignity and control over their own bodies and faces. Skin Deep comments on how identity can be flattened into stereotypical racial, cultural, and gendered images, asking what becomes omitted when we are seen through these representations.

Chinatown 2050 by Linda Zhang is an experimental short film inspired by a collection of stories written by Asian Canadians living in Toronto’s Chinatown. The project grew out of a series of community-based workshops led by Zhang, where participants contributed stories drawn from their memories and imaginations of Chinatown, later published in an accompanying anthology. In chapters such as “Hot Pot Politics,” the stories follow semi-fictional characters who grew up in Chinatown but have never visited China, questioning if they are “Canadian or Chinese enough.” These stories capture the diasporic dissonance and longing to understand one’s identity and reconnect with cultural origins.

With a background in architecture, Zhang has been 3D-scanning Chinatown’s built environment since moving to Toronto in 2018. These places include storefronts, street signs, and building interiors, such as the New Hong Fatt BBQ Restaurant, creating a digital archive of the neighbourhood. The film combines LiDAR 3D scans into visual collages, and the narration follows conversations between Zhang and the Toronto Community Land Trust. Journeying through the virtual environment, the audience encounters familiar buildings alongside spaces that no longer exist or have yet to exist. Zhang creates a speculative Chinatown where residents can explore their hopes and fears for the future of their neighbourhood.

Zhang combines 3D scans with visual motifs connected to personal and cultural memory: a Chinese lion dance head, a dumpling in a steamer, a traditional gold coin, and a temple façade. She also scanned and cast in ceramic a lucky cat given to her by her grandmother, placed on a table with a red tablecloth in front of the screen. The film is presented alongside cyanotype prints from the 1969 Save Chinatown campaign, city-planning blueprints, and other Chinatown advocacy materials from the City of Toronto Archives. Adjacent to the reading table is a 3D-printed, rock-shaped sculpture with the campaign doctrine printed in Chinese and English on opposite sides. Its form is derived from digital fragments of the façade of a Chinese temple arch in Chinatown, referencing the Chinese tradition of collecting unusual rocks for gardens, feng shui, and decoration. Utilizing 3D technology, Zhang’s work contemplates how archives can witness both the past and futures of a neighbourhood. In bringing together community stories, personal objects, digital scans, and institutional archives, Zhang also prompts questions about the relationship between official and personal memory: What enters the archive, and what is left out? Whose memories are preserved, and how do we remember and venerate those who came before us? Digital technology helps us preserve what might one day disappear while enabling us to collectively shape what comes next: a Chinatown that is affordable, safe, and remains a culturally meaningful home.

Together, the selected works in Depixelating History consider diverse forms of testimony and material witness: a 3D scan of Toronto’s Chinatown that outlives the building it records, Korean food market and karaoke signs that foreground the Indigenous language of the land, and masked portraits that reveal more than they conceal. Across these works, technology becomes a means of reactivating history while actively mapping what comes next. Through the process of “depixelating,” memories and traditions are carried forward in new forms. The exhibition imagines a speculative future in which tradition and technology exist in a symbiotic relationship, combining inherited knowledge with new possibilities to shape our sense of cultural identity and belonging.

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Gladys Lou is a curator and critic with an M.A. in Curatorial Studies at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, and a B.A. from the University of Toronto. She was awarded a Fulbright scholarship with a placement at the University of Washington, where she studied Digital Arts and Experimental Media in 2022. She has held curatorial and research positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Vtape, the Blackwood Gallery, and Ontario Culture Days. Her independent curatorial projects include "Curator Diary": The Curatorial Work of Shigeko Kubota (2026) at the Hessel Museum of Art, To see the world in a grain of sand (2025) at Factory Media Centre, and All watched over by machines of loving grace (2023) at InterAccess. Lou's critical writing and journalism have appeared in Hyperallergic, ArtReview, ArtAsiaPacific, C Magazine, MUBI Notebook, and Public Parking.


Chun Hua Catherine Dong (she/they) is a Chinese-born, Tiohtià/Montréal-based artist. Dong received an MFA in Intermedia from Concordia University and a BFA in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Dong has exhibited their work at the International Digital Art Biennial Montreal, the International Biennial of Digital Arts of the Île-de-France, the Quebec City Biennial, the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne in France, the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Canadian Cultural Centre Paris, the Museo de la Cancillería in Mexico City, The Rooms Museum, the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, the DongGang Museum of Photography in South Korea, the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, and the Hubei Museum of Fine Art in Wuhan. Dong was the recipient of the Franklin Furnace Award in New York in 2014 and a finalist for the Contemporary Art Award at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in 2020. Dong was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2024 and 2026.


Ryan Park’s practice begins with familiar objects, images, and actions that evoke multilayered processes: physical, temporal, biological, and social. He works fluidly across media and techniques to accentuate the properties of his source material, producing artworks that are both analytical and poetic. Born in Calgary (Mohkinstsis) to Korean immigrant parents, Park studied biology at the University of British Columbia and fine arts at Langara College, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and the University of Guelph. His work has been exhibited across Canada, the United States, and Europe, with recent solo exhibitions at Forest City Gallery, London; Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Kingston; and YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto. His work is in the collections of the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga, and the AGYU Artist Book Collection. He has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council, as well as fellowships from the Chalmers Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. He lives and works in Toronto (Tkaronto). 

Transportation for Ryan Park’s works were supported with exhibition assistance from the Ontario Arts Council.


Linda Zhang is a Toronto-based artist, researcher, and architect working in ceramics and new media. Her practice spans sites of architectural loss, gathering what persists: material residue, community memories, and the silences in official archives. Her spatial practice builds community power and supports anti-displacement efforts through memory technologies and architectural co-design. Using 3D scanning, digital animation, virtual reality, and speculative imagery alongside archival documents, ceramic processes, analogue film, and oral traditions, Zhang builds objects and environments that hold open a more generative space between a neighbourhood's past and its possible futures. She is the founder of Studio Pararaum and an associate professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. She holds an M.Arch I AP from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she received the James Templeton Kelley Prize and the AIA Henry Adams Certificate. Selected exhibitions include the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, the He Xiangning Art Museum, the Nieuwe Instituut, the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, the Mesh Festival of Art and Technology, and the DOXA Documentary Film Festival.

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As part of the exhibition public program, the screening Remapping Futures took place on Saturday, August 22, 2026

Remapping Futures presents experimental films and videos that fuse analog and digital media to document the afterlives of places and communities influenced by migration and urban transformation. Through archival research, film collage, 3D scanning, and digital animation, the selected works explore the capacity of moving images in preserving historical events and diasporic memories.

From the story of 8.75mm films once circulated in China to the imagined futures of Toronto’s Chinatown built upon community storytelling, the program considers how places and object carry intergenerational memories. Together, these works examine ways of recovering lost histories, reanimating abandoned sites, and connecting with loved ones who are no longer with us.

Film Lineup:

Peng Zuqiang, Afternoon Hearsay四散, 2025

Linda Zhang, Chinatown 2050, 2020

Daphne Xu, ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong, 2024

Gabriel Gabriel Garble, Well Wishes My Love, Your Love, 2022