Samson Young, Songs for Disaster Relief, Hong Kong in Venice 2017Samson Young performing at the Venice Biennale, 2017.
Samson Young (born 1979)[1] is a Hong Kong artist, working primarily in the mediums of sound performance and installations.[2]
Early life and education
Samson Young was born in Hong Kong.[1] He received both his BA degree in Music, Philosophy and Gender Studies and his M.Phil in Music Composition from The University of Hong Kong, and his PhD in Music Composition from Princeton University in 2013.[3]
He was an assistant professor in sonic art and physical computing at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Young is also the principal investigator at the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Musical Expression (L.U.M.E), and artistic director of the experimental sound advocacy organization Contemporary Musiking.[4]
Work
While Young's background is in music composition, his work as an artist spans a broad range of media, including performance, sound, video, drawing, and wall transfers. Young's work is frequently political in nature, addressing military history and the British occupation of Hong Kong as subjects.[5][6]
Nocturnal Music, the artist's 2015 exhibition at Team Gallery, centered on a performance, in which the artist sat at a desk for six hours every day, watching muted video footage of night-time airstrikes by the United States on the Middle East and re-creating the audio via foley effects, which he broadcast locally via a pirate FM radio channel.[7]
A 2015 drawing by Samson Young.
Career and recognition
In 2015, Young was the inaugural recipient of the BMW Art Journey Award[8][9] and the Hong Kong Arts Centre Honorary Fellowship in 2018.[10] Major exhibitions include A Dark Theme Keeps Me Here, I'll Play a Broken Music, at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2017, Performa 19 in 2019, and the Hong Kong pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale.[11][12]
Selected exhibitions
Solo exhibitions
2021 – The World Falls Apart Into Facts, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan[13]
2020 – MAM Collection 012: Samson Young, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan[14]
2019 – Samson Young - It's a heaven over there,Centre A Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Vancouver, BC [15][16]
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