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FormalPara Brandon Farnsworth:

Your education and early career started in New Music, however now you are now mainly working in contemporary art. How did this transition take place?

FormalPara Samson Young:

When I started out, I was trained as a pretty standard concert-hall composer. I studied music in my undergraduate degree and also my masters and PhD were in music composition, although in my bachelor’s degree I also majored in gender studies and philosophy. After my graduate studies in Sydney, Australia, I came back to Hong Kong to do a Masters’ degree at the University of Hong Kong. During that time, I met artists from different disciplines, especially new media artists through Videotage. Although they started by supporting media art, they have since evolved to supporting many new media.

I started working collectively with people that I met through Videotage, so I was doing a lot of collaborative work during that time. New media art was very different to music in its relationship with tools, which really opened my eyes to different possibilities. When I moved away from Hong Kong to do my graduate studies in the US, I wanted to keep making installations and video works, so I started learning on my own how to make videos and hack stuff, working especially with electronics and physical computing. My practice slowly evolved through these different pockets of obscure skills I developed.

I still make music and work with musicians though. I write music for concert spaces in a more traditional way, but even when I am making installation-type works in a gallery or museum space, I still try to find opportunity to compose music. For example, in Utopian Trilogy (2018–2019), even though it was a series of video installation with animation and multi-channel sound, there were still a lot of compositional and musical elements.

I am very aware of how people listen differently in a concert space vs. in a gallery, and how that bears upon writing music. I am not interested in recreating the concert conditions of listening in a gallery space, like having a definite beginning and ending, or soundproofing the space perfectly to recreate a concert situation. That being said, there are certain things I can do in a gallery space that are not as easy in a concert space, like how you can walk around while listening, or how movement affects the listening experience.

I would not want the gallery space to become a concert hall, but acoustic considerations could benefit the viewing experience, and I noticed that curators are becoming more sensitive to how sound works in space too. Video spaces are now typically laid with carpet to dampen the reverberation, and people are more careful with the choice of speakers. At the same time, I can see that concert spaces are evolving too. Even places like the Darmstadt Summer Course are becoming aware of different kinds of practices, like sound installations, or compositions with visual or theatrical elements. What I am interested in though is not turning one space into another, but rather, asking how listening functions differently in various spaces.

FormalPara BF:

What are the challenges of working in the field of contemporary art?

FormalPara SY:

I think there is a higher level of critical engagement in the contemporary art world in general, which is good. There are more multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary conversations too in general. But I sometimes also do miss what you could call the concert world’s obsession with analysis, where there is more of an engagement with form and with material. In the concert world I think the musical text is still a sort of baseline, for better or for worst.

I once wrote a short analysis of Cardew’s Treaties to get my head around what makes the work interesting. What could one get out of a ‘close reading’ of it? Is it a futile project?

Treatise is one of those moments in the history of contemporary music that curators just love to bring up. When I hear curators talk about it, I sometime wish that they would just point us to a page, and actually show us how the marks on the page do the work that they want the work to do for them, instead of just dancing around the marks. The thing is that I think this can be done, because Cardew had already made it easy for even non-musicians to engage with the notation intuitively.

FormalPara BF:

Your work is often realised with the help of a team. What is your role within your artistic practice?

FormalPara SY:

It really depends, in more complex works that involve a team of people and a bigger budget, I play the role of a director and producer. If the work involves music, the music of any production that featured Michael Schiefel (a jazz singer who is also one of my more regular collaborators) would be improvised by Michael; otherwise, more often than not I compose the music. Sometimes I also appropriate pre-existing compositions, in those works, I am more of an arranger. If it involved video or animation, then I am usually the one who did the animating, the editing and the post-production, but I would work with camera crews to capture the footages, and I purchase 3D assets from the internet for my animation.

I think the world is slowly moving away from singular authorship though. I am currently involved in this side project with a couple of friends called EnsemblDAO, which is using decentralised autonomous organisations [DAOs] to think about collective creativity. As a member of EnsemblDAO you can claim a ‘stake’ in the project through conceptual contribution, through monetary contribution, by putting the actual artistic or manual labour into it, or by writing about it and furthering the discourse of the project, etc.

FormalPara BF:

Where do you locate criticality in your practice?

FormalPara SY:

This is quite a broad question, but recently I have become interested in these moments when different logics collide. Currently, I am researching the history of systems for categorising musical instruments in museum collections. Categorisation systems like this are precisely the point where bodies making the music meet the ‘grid’ and get swallowed up by it. Another example is my work The World Falls Apart Into Fact (2019), which follows the history of the Chinese Molihua melody through the ears of English statesman Sir John Barrow. In the piece, I explore this very complicated history of transmission, where an English mishearing of the melody now actually constitutes the song’s identity, and by extension, a nation's musical self-perception. Audiences of art these days are already educated in post-colonial currents and other progressive discourse. Rather than straight-forwardly reaffirming their positions, I try to take them through a thinking process with me, and complicate things further for both myself and for my viewer.