Reasonable Music

Samson Young’s Artist’s Room features a new, site-specific installation, Reasonable Music – an interactive environment consisting of (text as) sound and (text as) image. The components within this environment are derived from the processing of translating the Daoist text Daodejing. Insights from computational analysis on the text’s formal features are filtered through human intuition to generate a network of sonic and visual objects. As formal features progress along a chain of events, they are transformed, distorted, and take on new features.

Drawn largely from the Art Jameel Collection, Artist’s Rooms is a series of solo exhibitions by influential, innovative artists, with a particular focus on practitioners from the Middle East, Asia and Africa. These capsule shows are collaborative and curated in dialogue with the artist. 

Artist’s Rooms: Samson Young is accompanied by a monograph with an essay by Orianna Cacchione, Curator of Global Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art, at the University of Chicago. The monograph is published by Art Jameel and is available from the Art Jameel Shop. 

Reasonable Music is commissioned by Art Jameel in collaboration with the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and Burger Collection. Each venue will show an iteration of the work, one on display at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the other on display at Jameel Arts Centre from Saturday, October 30, 2021.

About Samson Young 

Multidisciplinary artist Samson Young (b. 1979, Hong Kong; lives and works in Hong Kong) works in sound, performance, video and installation. He graduated with a PhD in Music Composition from Princeton University in 2013. In 2017, he represented Hong Kong at the 57th Venice Biennale. Other solo projects have been presented at the de Appel, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA), Manchester; M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Ryosoku-in Temple, within the Kenninji Temple, Kyoto; and Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; among others. Young’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Performa 19 Biennial, New York; the 21st Biennale of Sydney; the 12th Shanghai Biennale; National Museum of Art, Osaka; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; and documenta 14: documenta radio; among others. In 2020, he was awarded the inaugural Sigg Prize. His works are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Kadist, San Francisco.