Hong Kong–based artist Samson Young works across performance, video, and installation to rigorously examine sound and its cultural politics. New Work: Samson Young, his first solo exhibition on the West Coast, debuts Intentness and songs, a multimedia installation that poetically traces the idiosyncratic rhythms of love, memory, and experiences of time.
In this work, Young translates dates and events of sentimental and cultural significance into hand and computer-made markings on wooden boards that line the floor. Image- and language-based generative AI models trained on these and other related datasets search, retrieve, and reinterpret the source material in real time, driving an interconnected audiovisual landscape. The artist recently spoke with exhibition curators Karen Cheung and Alison Guh about his practice and the installation.
Karen Cheung + Alison Guh: Can you introduce our audience to your practice and where you find inspiration?
Samson Young: I was originally trained as a composer and then I transitioned to working in multimedia arts through collaboration with people. These days, I make works that involve video, sound, 3-D objects (often 3-D printed), as well as performance. I’m also an amateur programmer.
I find inspiration in different ways. I read and also play around with material and software. Often, it’s a back-and-forth process where I have an idea and then I experiment with software and material that might drive the process one way or another. Of course, it involves conversation with people like curators who work on the exhibition together, and the space. All of these factor into the process.
KC/AG: In addition to your formal training as a musician and composer, you have been involved with visual arts and experimental music scenes internationally over the years. How do you approach sound in your work now?
SY: The methods and technologies I use have shifted over time, but my approach has been to consider hearing as one part of a full-body experience. I also like (though, I don’t know if I always manage) to make something out of spaces that are in between senses. I hope these ideas still come through in the different works that I am involved in.
AG/KC: You often incorporate new technologies into your work as they emerge in real time. What motivates you to use them in your practice?
SY: I am reasonably lousy at programming and 3-D modeling, but I have a lot of fun trying. The process of breaking down a larger design problem into smaller ones and then finding different ways to resolve them just makes me happy. Also, I think of technologies not as neutral tools for content but as extensions of me — my thinking, sensory perception, or some other aspect — into physical and virtual space. In the process of engaging these technologies I am also conditioned, becoming more receptive to certain ways of processing the world.
[In Intentness and songs], there are two AI memory recall systems. The first AI system is visualized by the back-wall projection and monitor, and sonified by the speakers in the polyhedron columns on the floor. A large language model (or LLM, an AI model trained to understand and generate human language) picks a random week from a database of my Google calendar events from 2011 to 2023.
The AI model runs the calendar data through a program that creates combinations of words, numbers, and code that can be displayed visually on screens, but also played sonically through the speakers in the polyhedron columns as the data is being processed. The time varies because I use a few different LLMs with different performance speeds, and I also vary my prompts.
Each column is programmed differently, resulting in different responses and sounds, some random, others super delayed or super slowed down. The graphical elements on the projection are the original files of archival records that formed the basis of the drawings on the floorboards, but are displayed in randomized combinations. There is also a live feed of the gallery space (focusing on the drawing on the wall), and a live feed from my studio in Hong Kong.
The second AI system is visualized on the side TV screen, and sonified through the spherical speaker. Instead of calendar events, the AI is reading through interviews conducted with me and my husband, Tommy, about our first meeting, our first apartment together, our wedding, and other shared memories.
When the LLM is “reading” the interview, every time a recall happens, the duration of that recall is logged as a number and rectangle (a longer recall time equals a longer rectangle), along with a timestamp, on the background of the graphic panel. Once the system accumulates fifty memory recalls, it triggers a sound event, played back through the spherical speaker in the middle of the space. Each “recorded memory recall” triggers one audio file, which is a single excerpted moment from a choral piece I composed called When He Said, with words from a poem by Madeleine Slavick. The singers are members of the Hong Kong Chinese University Student Union Chorus.
AG/KC: The datasets and memories that drive these generative AI systems also relate to the datasets that underpin the bespoke floorboards. Tell us about the boards.
SY: There are two kinds of boards in this exhibition, laid out like a calendar. One row of boards represents one year and each wooden floorboard represents a month in a year. The farthest row is the year 1976. The year closest to the entrance is the year 2023. There are 14 boards in one row, 12 wooden, another two 3-D printed. The graphics on the wooden boards translate information from five public and private sources: news headline images, cultural events drawn from an archive of Hong Kong Urban Council activities, screenshots of TV shows aired drawn from the Internet Archive, icons of files on my computer, and my Google calendar.
The drawings on the boards are created through a mix of techniques, [including] using a plotter machine that I attach an ink pen or brush to. For the screenshots of TV programs, instead of drawing the outline of the screenshot as I did with some of the other boards, the lines were rendered as dots and I reconnected the dots with a pastel, but made other lines that did not follow the original contours. I particularly enjoyed that group because it’s a combination of archival materials and another layer of interpretation.
The 3-D–printed boards have personal objects and 3-D–printed works embedded within them. I printed the majority of the latter by mixing two color filaments, which created a marbled pattern. The personal objects — some are mine, some are Tommy’s — on the individual boards are usually connected by shape, theme, or type.
KC/AG: There are close to sixty of these personal objects throughout the exhibition. Can you describe a couple and why they were important to include?
SY: Some of them are reminders and notes-to-self. One is an audio cable on that came from an experience of working with Kayo Tokuda and her colleagues Shunya Hashizume and Akane Takahashi on an exhibition in Kyoto that opened just before COVID hit. They hand-colored these audio cables with pastel on the floor of a tatami room. That was a time that I want to remember. On that same 3-D–printed board, there is also an anklet from my husband, which had been worn on his foot, then his younger brother’s and sister’s feet, while each were toddlers. This is an index of one aspect of Tommy — his bond with his siblings, both of whom now live away from Hong Kong.
KC/AG: What do you hope people take from the experience of Intentness and songs?
SY: I hope that people experience the work visually — there is a lot of visual material and color — but also experience it as a kind of interaction of different rhythms, cycles, and dynamics and how they work in the space in a somewhat fluid way.
New Work: Samson Young is on view through June 22, 2025, on Floor 4.