Global Sonic Culture
Sound Arts Visiting Practitioner Lecture Series – 19th May – Samson Young
Multi-disciplinary artist Samson Young works in sound, performance, video, and installation. In 2017 he represented Hong Kong with a solo project titled Songs for Disaster Relief at the 57th Venice Biennale. He was the recipient of the BMW Art Journey Award, a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in Sound Art and Digital Music, and in 2020 he was awarded the inaugural Uli Sigg Prize.
He has exhibited at venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Performa 19, New York; Biennale of Sydney; Shanghai Biennale; National Museum of Art, Osaka; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Ars Electronica, Linz; and documenta 14: documenta radio, among others. Recent solo projects include: the De Appel, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; SMART Museum, Chicago; Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Manchester; M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Ryosoku-in at the Kenninji Temple, Kyoto; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; and Jameel Art Centre, Dubai, among others.
Samson Young studied music, philosophy and gender studies. He was Hong Kong Sinfonietta’s Artist Associate in 2008, and graduated with a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University in 2013.
”Memorizing the Tristan Chord (Institute of Fictional Ethnomusicology) was commissioned by the Goethe Institut in Hong Kong to commemorate the 200th birthday of Richard Wagner. Through an open call, I recruited Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong to invent Cantonese phrases that would map onto the pitch contour that leads up to and immediately follows the “Tristan chord” from the opening moments of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Participants were asked to sing their invented Cantonese phrase several times in front of the camera.”
Samson Young always gets cool and novel ideas owing to his experiments of mix medias and he also draw voices in sketchbooks which let me think of what I can do in my next project. He builds up sound in a painting way but does not rely on pictures.
https://norient.com/blog/memorizing-the-tristan-chord
The artist experiments with the idea of a music that is time-/place-/and people-specific. The specific conditions for this composition are as follows: composed for an ensemble of military veterans from Taiwan, some other qualities to be determined through exchanges, at a former air force base, to be performed at the beginning of the nautical twilight. The composition may not be performed again outside of these specific conditions. This composition is the first in a new series performance by the artist that explores notions of freedom and agency, and is accompanied by an essay titled Graphic scores, imagination, freedom, agency, and the limits of _____ (One exercise in meaning making with thinking-forms).