‘Hong Kong has always had an active local art scene,’ the artist says, ‘but it wasn’t always as connected to the larger conversation as it is now.’

Samson Young reflects on his artistic trajectory and Hong Kong’s evolving art scene

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Visual and sound artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8976/Samson-Young" target="_blank">Samson Young</a> is a Hong Kong native. Over the last four decades, he has witnessed the evolution of the city’s music scene and artworld and even represented the region at the 2017 Venice Biennale. In this time, he has also seen how Art Basel’s show in Hong Kong has helped nurture the city’s artistic landscape since its launch in 2013. In this conversation, the artist talks about the influence of&nbsp;Hong Kong’s energy on his work and remembers some of the projects he has unveiled at Art Basel over the years.

Clément Dirié: Art Basel is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. I can’t ask you what you were doing in 1970, because you were born in 1979, but I can ask you what you were doing in 2013, the year Art Basel launched in Hong Kong.Samson Young: 2013 was an eventful year. I submitted my PhD thesis after seven long years and was also teaching full-time. I had a solo exhibition, ‘On the musically beautiful’, at the Goethe-Institut’s space in the Hong Kong Arts Centre, and that was the first time I tried to make a gallery exhibition about music. That year I also started the ‘Liquid Borders’ series, in which I collected all sorts of sounds emitted in the restricted zone along the Hong Kong/Mainland China border to create compositions and transcribe them into graphical notations.CD: You primarily studied music and were involved in Hong Kong’s sound and experimental music scene before becoming involved in the contemporary artworld. How did you come to visual arts?SY: After finishing my BA at the University of Sydney I returned to Hong Kong and stayed for a few years before leaving to attend graduate school in the United States. Around that time, I started to interact with artists from outside the music world and to collaborate with people on multimedia works. The first time I showed in a gallery was in 2004 as part of the collective Emergency Lab. After that&nbsp;I organically went&nbsp;from collaborating with people across disciplines to making my own work.

CD: People often think your work represents the voice of Hong Kong in the international contemporary artworld. How do you feel about that? SY: I don’t know if that is necessarily true. When I think of the Hong Kong art scene, I think of artists like painters&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/41084/Hon-Chi-Fun" target="_blank">Hon Chi-fun</a> and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/18751/Irene-Chou" target="_blank">Irene Chou</a>, who experimented with forms between cultures; of pioneering video artists like May Fung and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/stories/meet-the-artists-ellen-pau-hong-kong" target="_blank">Ellen Pau</a>, who have one foot in Hong Kong cinema and the other in experimental performance; and of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/9113/Frog-King" target="_blank">Frog King</a> and Bing Lee, whose large-scale asemic writings bridge calligraphy and graffiti. The voices of this city are diverse and rich in contradictions, which are sometimes overlooked by curators and historians who are more interested in national narratives.CD: How has the evolution of Hong Kong over the last five years affected your work?SY: In many different ways. Obviously, the energy and the intensity of the city have found their way into my practice, and I have also taken inspiration from the city’s history. On a more abstract level, things in this city are often just thrown together, like a stew, and that also influences how I put something together. When you try to combine elements that are very different from one another, you can conceal the rough edges and fold the sharp corners until you reach a resolved form, or you can let things sit parallelly and in juxtaposition. Hong Kong has always thrived on such juxtapositions, but in the last couple years, we’ve witnessed a slow move toward an artificial and forcefully imposed surface coherence. I am still feeling my way through these changes and how it is affecting my work, but I have become more interested in these seemingly abstract problems that are not so abstract in the end.CD: In 2016, after you won the inaugural BMW Art Journey, you organized So You Are Old by the Time You Reach the Island in one of Hong Kong’s most dynamic neighborhoods, the Admiralty. Can you talk a little bit about this project and what it might look like today?SY: The work was a multimedia experience that people walked through, and its title was taken from a line in the Greek poem Ithaka&nbsp;by Constantine P. Cavafy, which to me is about faith. The work’s designated route was from the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition&nbsp;Centre to the government headquarters, but today that path is under constant police surveillance. Now there are layers of riot barricades in front of the government headquarters, where the final scene took place. The Fenwick Pier, which was the midway checkpoint of the walk, is going to be dismantled in 2021. I think it would be interesting to remake that work against the backdrop of a changed landscape, and I remain hopeful that one day it will be possible.

CD: The first edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong was in 2013. How have you seen the city’s art scene evolve since then?SY: Hong Kong has always had an active local art scene, but it wasn’t always as connected to the larger conversation as it is now. The fair brought international visitors: Soon curators from around the world were visiting local studios and international artists became interested in exhibiting here. Many things were changing around 2013, including the development of the West Kowloon Cultural District and the soon-to-be-opened M+ museum, so it’s difficult to isolate one event, but Art Basel in Hong Kong was certainly an important contributing factor to these shifts.CD: As an artist, what is one of your strongest memories from Art Basel, be it from the show in Hong Kong, Basel, or Miami Beach?SY: Staging Canon in 2016 for Unlimited in Basel was a challenge I won’t forget – it probably shortened my life by a few years! It was the first time I had staged the piece and also the first time I had worked with the Long Range Acoustic Device equipment. Sound-wise, it just didn’t work the way I had planned, which made all of my galleries and Gianni Jetzer, the sector’s curator, really nervous. It caused all sorts of problems for other artists, too, because the sound was reflecting off walls; it went everywhere and leaked into other booths. I’m glad to have survived the experience, but I still get nervous just thinking about what went down that week.

Top image:&nbsp;Samson Young,&nbsp;So You Are Old by the Time You Reach the Island, 2016.&nbsp;Site-specific visual and sound installation in the streets of Hong Kong.&nbsp;Courtesy of the artist.

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‘Hong Kong has always had an active local art scene,’ the artist says, ‘but it wasn’t always as connected to the larger conversation as it is now.’