Samson Young to represent Hong Kong at the 57th Venice Biennale

Edouard Malingue Gallery is thrilled to congratulate Samson Young on his representation of Hong Kong at the 57th Venice Biennale, which opens May 13, 2017. The pavilion will be curated by Ying Kwok, previously the curator at the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester, UK, from 2006–12. Doryun Chong, deputy (and acting) director and chief curator of M+, is a consulting curator on the project. Artist and composer Samson Young (b.1979) studied music, philosophy and gender studies at the University of Sydney and holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University. Young's diverse practice draws from the avant-garde compositional traditions of aleatoric music, musique concrète, and graphical notation. Behind each project is an extensive process of research, involving a mapping of the process through a series of "sound sketches" and audio recordings. His drawing, radio broadcast, performance and composition touch upon the recurring topics of conflict, war, and political frontiers. Key to Young’s interest in conflict is its interplay with identity. Young appropriates the components of music – beat, rhythm, notational signs and musical symbols – to flesh out global conflicts that have affected our past and present. Young was the inaugural winner of the BMW Art Journey Award at the Art Basel Hong Kong 2015. He has participated in group exhibitions at venues including 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; Asia Triennial, Manchester; Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle; Arko Art Center, Seoul; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland; the Moscow Biennale of Young Art, Moscow; Amos Anderson Museum, Helsinki; Today Art Museum, Beijing; and Taipei Contemporary Art Museum, Taiwan. Recent and upcoming solo projects include Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2015); Para Site, Hong Kong (2016) and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (December 2016).