Samson Young (born 1979) works across sound, performance, video, and installation. He studied Music, Philosophy, and Gender Studies at the University of Sydney, followed by an M. Phil. in Music Composition at the University of Hong Kong, and then a doctorate in Music Composition at Princeton University. He is the founder of sound art and experimental music group CMHK. Young joined the Emergency Lab collective early in his career, whose membership included collaborators such as Christopher Lau.
He has exhibited at Guggenheim Museum, New York; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Performa 19, New York; Biennale of Sydney; Kochi-muziris Biennial; Shanghai Biennale; Guangzhou Triennial; Sonic Acts Biennial, Amsterdam; Boras Art Biennale, Sweden; National Museum of Art, Osaka; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Ars Electronica, Linz; documenta 14: documenta radio; and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, among others. Selected solo projects include the De Appel, Amsterdam; Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf; 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.
In 2017 he represented Hong Kong at the 57th Venice Biennale, and he is the recipient of numerous awards: BMW Art Journey Award, Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in Sound Art and Digital Music, and the inaugural Uli Sigg Prize.
LUCIJA ŠUTEJ: Let’s keep things light at the start (laugh) by looking at your journey into the world of music.
SAMSON YOUNG: (Laugh) My earliest music-making was singing in the school choir, and later on, I picked up the piano and the double bass. Like many children in Hong Kong, I had weekly music classes at school, which were filled with singing. We sang popular tunes, but also traditional songs.
I started branching out from music when I returned from my undergraduate studies in Sydney to Hong Kong to work as a concert manager at the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Music. I took a short course in arts administration in 2004/2005, which connected me to administrators from different fields, including media art.
LŠ: At Princeton University, you studied under Paul Lansky. How did it impact your research and thinking about not only music composition and its many layers but also listening practices that are developed by the audience?
SY: Paul (Lansky) was a pioneer in computer music. He was an inspiration. But, I learned the most from my graduate student peers, such as sound artist Seth Cluett, who was in my year, and Betsey Biggs, who was a couple of years above me.
The summer before I started my Ph.D., I attended the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The period was an essential summer because I met musicians such as Paula Matthusen, Eric K M Clark, Olivia De Prato and others who wanted to explore other media.
LŠ: As you returned to Hong Kong, you co-formed the collective Emergency Lab with friends Christopher Lau and poet Ron Lam — I would love to hear more about how you met and started working together.
SY: Through the arts administration course, I met Ashley Yeung, who worked at the media art organization VIDEOTAGE. Ashley alerted me to their exhibitions and events, and there I met video artist and programmer Christopher Lau and writer and poet Ron Lam. They were my earliest collaborators and one of my earliest collaborative works was titled Gong-tormented Sea at the Osage Gallery in Kwan Tong. I learned a lot from Christopher and Ron. They were graduates of the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong, the only new media art program in the city at the time. It was liberating to experience their way of thinking. Music training prioritizes techniques, while my collaborators’ relationship to craft was relaxed.
A major project Christopher and I made together was an exhibition associated with the Bloomberg Emerging Artists Award. It was titled The Happiest Hour. We made works using recycled Nintendo game boys. I am a bit of a geek, and the 8-bit era at the time was important to me. Another important work for us was Ritual Machine at the Microwave Media Art Festival. In this work, Christopher took care of the programming and the visuals; I focused on the sound. This was the first time I exhibited in a media art festival.
LŠ: You also founded Musiking Hong Kong (CMHK), which, in addition to running a festival, was also an important support system for emerging artists in the city.
SY: I founded Musiking Hong Kong (CMHK) in 2007. The organization is a not-for-profit advocacy group that supports cross-disciplinary practices in sound. In its first years, CMHK mainly presented my works. Soon, it evolved into an organization that ran a regular concert series and presented primarily other people’s works. We hosted workshops and organized exchange projects. The Hong Kong Arts Development Council now funds CMHK.
I performed at the Lacking Sound Festival (LSF) in Taipei in 2011. The festival presented young sound artists and had an online archive. It was a small but regular operation. Looking at their archive, you get a sense of the development of the Taipei sound art scene. At that time in Hong Kong, artists working with sound operated independently. I thought it might be good to try to start something similar to LSF, as a way to document activities.
I approached the Hong Kong Art Centre with this proposal and Connie Lam, the director at the time, liked the idea. They offered me a few dates for one of their small theaters. That was how the Sonic Anchor series started in 2012. CMHK’s other programs evolved from there but these days, I am no longer CMHK’s head. The incredible Karen Yu now runs the organization and under her guidance, CMHK now runs an annual festival and a sound art summer camp.
LŠ: Could we look at Hong Kong’s arts scene when Musiking Hong Kong joined?
SY: Hong Kong had an active art scene, but there were fewer institutions. Small and independent organizations had important roles to play. These groups, such as Para/site, were funded by the Arts Development Council.
For my development, an influential organization was VIDEOTAGE. Ellen Pau, a video art pioneer in Hong Kong, founded VIDEOTAGE. I admire her works and how she nurtured VIDEOTAGE into a community of practice. In a way, VIDEOTAGE was a model for CMHK.
LŠ : Speaking of Para/site – could we revisit your show Orchestrations that looked into the modalities of “orchestra-making”?
SY: The show came about through a three-way conversation between myself, curator Qinyi Lim, and musicologist Dr. Giorgio Biancorosso from the Music Department of the University of Hong Kong. We looked into the orchestra as an organization and as a concept. I had played in orchestras as a teenager. At that time, I was leading a laptop orchestra project at the School of Creative Media where I taught. I made a video for the exhibition, in which I followed a community-based Chinese-instrument Orchestra and a Javanese Gamelan Ensemble. This was an open-ended research. I am still thinking through the questions raised.
LŠ: Obviously, a lot of the talk about sound art cannot be separated from a conversation on technology. As the latter develops, more possibilities are opened, affecting our engagement and listening practices. Also, it was a subject of your exhibition in Edinburgh: Real Music, in partnership with the Next Generation Sound Synthesis (NESS) research group within Edinburgh College of Art’s Reid School of Music.
SY: Tessa Giblin, who directed the gallery and invited me to show there, introduced me to the faculties at the University of Edinburgh. I was drawn to the work of Stefan Bilbao from the Music Department. He works with physical models of musical instruments. Physical modeling is a common technique in computer music. Stefan Bilbao’s approach used speedy computers with parallel hardware and his models incorporated many nuanced parameters.
At Stefan’s lab, I could tinker with the programming side of things using a pure data (PD) patch I wrote, and I explored the extreme ranges of the models. I designed “hypothetical instruments” that couldn’t exist in the physical world. I made sounds that were idiomatic to the process. I like to use technology in a way that it is not intended to.
LŠ: In our previous conversation – you mentioned the important role of fieldwork for you in gathering sounds – do you have any upcoming field trips planned?
SY: I want to visit the data centers that are housed inside ancient caves in the city of Guangzhou in China. Something about the coming together of modernity and antiquity interests me.
Before COVID-19, I spent time at the Ryosoku-In in the Kenninji Temple in Kyoto. I was invited there by curator Kayo Tokuda. The temple gave me a small tea house to work from. I spent my mornings making recordings, sketching sounds, and gathering imprints of architectural features of the temple.
*Super Dark Energy/ for processed glockenspiel and electronics, Music by Samson Young, performed by David Cossin. Courtesy of the artist.
LŠ: Do you plan to further research the dynamic relationship between sound and its built surroundings?
SY: It’s not a conscious focus for me, but I am sensitive to the acoustics of spaces. I am interested in how people listen differently in different spaces.
