Brilliant Ideas Episode #37: Samson Young

Samson Young’s interest in music started from his childhood in Australia. Like a fever, he had been possessed in playing every instrument. This experience became a solid base of his creative world today. Studying music composition in the U.S. afterwards, he was inspired by many musicians and started his artistic experiments. As he continued to experiment with music, his works gradually proceeded towards a new direction, not being limited to certain music genres. Interactive performance art was one of the many areas he approached. <Memorizing the Tristan Chord>(2013) is based on <Tristan und Isolde> by the German composer Richard Wagner. Samson Young let 70 people in front of a camera to put Chinese words they want respectively to the music, which is beyond the traditional form of composition. Keeping the chords of the music, he let the people sing whatever comes to their mind at the moment. Some sang the original lyrics, while other spontaneously spoke about issues in their minds such as politics, history, or daily lives, putting unique spins of each individual on the music, which has a remarkable meaning in the music history. To the artist, who has tried new things through the creative processes, art is not about sending a message but a journey for solving complex issues in the world. He wants to go on this journey with the viewers.

Samson Young is famous for travelling between experimental music and sounds and contemporary art. His intensive research for the artworks also stands out. In particular, he focuses on studying the history of a place and letting people know about the history through sounds. <Liquid Borders>(2012-2014) is a work that introduced sound drawing, a new breakthrough in art. The project started in 2012, when the Hong Kong government decided to open the border between China and Hong Kong, he concentrated on the anxiety that had been growing about the opening. Young began his research by walking along the path stretched on the border alongside the barber-wired fence, feeling the vibration on the wire created by external factors. He went on and made an archive of records contained in the barbed wires. Some may have imagined the sound of the wires to be ambiguous, while others may not have even thought about how it would sound; the sounds were low-pitched and quiet defying expectations, leading Young towards a new form of imagination. The artist recorded the sound of the wires and the surrounding environment, made it into a score using a voice synthesis system, and then transformed it into graphics. Added with the drawings of booklets, pictures, and maps published by the government, the artwork introduced a path to a new style in which music and art was combined.

The art world of Samson Young forms a harmony between sound and visual images. Through the experimental practices using mixed mediums such as performance, radio broadcasts, films, installations and sound drawings, he is expanding the realm of creation. His works that have been completed after an extensive research focus on subjects of conflicts, war and political issues with a sense of wit.
Born in 1979 in Hong Kong, Samson Young studied philosophy and gender studies at University of Sydney, and composition at Princeton University and now he is devoting himself to producing art works. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and participated in various festivals such as the ‘Internationale Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik Darmstadt’ and the ‘Hong Kong Arts Festival’. He has also been selected as an artist to represent Hong Kong at the ‘Venice Biennale’ in 2017.