words rachel mok

Hong Kong Explodes is not a terrorist plot
Samson Young personifies the emerging, contemporary artist – he is youthful, highly talented and a touch schizophrenic. Or should that be multi-faceted. As a graduate pursuing a doctorate degree in composition at Princeton University, Young is refined and gentlemanly. Last year he won the Bloomberg Emerging Artist Award – the first local artist to do so – and his compositions have wowed audiences in the concert halls of New York, Australia, Iceland, Germany and, of course, Hong Kong.

Yet don’t look too closely at Po the Teletubby as she brushes past on a crowded Hong Kong street – beneath the costume you might be shocked to find that very same Princeton scholar and gentleman. And if, as a fly on his wall, you could be excused for wanting to call the mental health squad as you watch him deconstructing Game Boys and talk about exploding Hong Kong while it chats with Johann Sebastian Bach.

But fear not, there is method – and no little intelligence – to Young’s madness, as his latest musical project quickly proves. Hong Kong Explodes: A City in Conversation with Bach has little to do with lurid projections of an unstable mind but is a 70-minute multi-channel video montage of Hong Kong set to Bach’s Two Part Invention and music composed by Samson Young. The show, with electric guitar quartet DITHER, premiered in New York’s Greenwich Village earlier this month.
Young worked with video artists Christopher Lau and Adrian Yeung to come up with footage they describe as “apocalyptic visions [of a] Chinese city crumbling into pieces”. Not only was the composer involved in the music composition and filming, but also had a hand in editing and designing the video art. “We filmed a lot of neon lights in the city. Especially those sparkling, in-your-face ones,” he says, “It looks like Hong Kong is exploding…”

Young specializes in the double bass, an instrument he once had doubts about. “For a while I thought I had learnt the wrong instrument… An instrument without history and which has to borrow pieces written for other instruments to play.” But on deeper reflection he realised that the double bass had parallels with his hometown. “Hong Kong,” he says, “was a colony and we borrowed other people’s, say, language and legal system. And now after the Handover, we are trying to be China’s city. It’s like Hong Kong has never grown up. We are always borrowing from others and forgetting our own character.” And so the city, unable to recognise its own personality, ‘explodes’ trying to wear the character of whatever cultural influences chance its way.

For the 2008-2009 season, Young will be Artist Associate with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and will also continue working with Contemporary Musiking, the organization he set up in 2006 to develop and commission contemporary music in the SAR. Heavily influenced by composers like John Cage, John Adams and Philip Glass, Young believes contemporary music in Hong Kong is lagging way behind that in the US and Europe. What does ‘contemporary music’ mean to him? “Any live writing of music is, of course, contemporary, but for composers like me trained in the academy, our way of expression may be different,” he says. His pieces may be “long and more demanding”, but ultimately Young hopes audiences will not be scared by the term ‘contemporary’. “I don’t know why people are not so afraid of terms like modern dance, but once they hear contemporary music they think it is weird music… like music for a haunted house.” And while he is always eager to try out new possibilities, he keeps one priority in mind: “I think Hong Kong composers writing for Hong Kong performers is very important. It may even be more important than reaching out to
the audience.”

Like a lot of guys his age, Young is addicted to video games. In The Happiest Hour, a five-installation exhibition he created with media artist Christopher Lau, one of the installations is made up of hundreds of reconstructed Game Boys – video game music also plays a big role in his compositions. But none of this is for the sake of gimmickry, it is all an honest reflection of his cultural upbringing. “I used to have all this orientalism in my work, but then I asked myself if it was honest to use such elements? No, because I didn’t grow up listening to Beijing or Cantonese opera.” That introspection also inspired him to focus his doctoral thesis on the development of contemporary music in China: To Young, as long as a composer honestly portrays himself in his music, his work will be representative of his time. “That is why I always try to explore with electric appliances, because that is a reflection of people with similar backgrounds to me.”

Hong Kong Explodes: A City in Conversation with Bach will be performed from October 30 to November 1 at Fringe Club Fringe Theatre. Shows will start at 8pm and tickets are $120 from HK Ticketing, 31 288 288.