The Hong Kong artist explains the methods behind his intriguing sketches
It’s hard to keep up with Generation T lister Samson Young. One day the artist can be in St. Petersburg to record the chime of a clock in the Hermitage Museum, and the next he can be sitting in his Hong Kong studio, recreating the noise of gunfire and explosions using household objects.
Although all of Young’s projects are driven by his obsession with sound, his varied output includes videos, performances, music and Sound Drawings, which are his attempt to visualise different noises on paper.
One of his video works, Muted Situation #5, is currently on display at MOCA Taipei's Spectrosynthesis exhibition, which is being dubbed the first LGBTQ exhibition at a major, government-run museum in Asia.
Here, Young tells the stories behind his Sound Drawings and reveals what he’s got planned for the next few months.
Your Sound Drawings are visual representations of noises or songs you’ve heard. How do you express sounds on paper? Do you always draw particular sounds as certain colours, for example?
There’s actually a lot of research now about synesthesia, about how some people see certain colours when they hear a sound. For me, I ‘hear’ C Major as a light, transparent yellow. B flat is always a light, baby blue. B minor is purplish, a dirty purplish kind of colour. The key of D major for me is brown.
Have you always seen sounds in that way?
When I was studying piano [as a teenager], I would play scales. Scale practice is just going up and down the keys and playing the notes. They’re really boring practices, but I noticed then that I would sense a particularly key as a particular colour. And the impressions are consistent – if I return to D Major another day, I’ll still feel like it’s this brownish colour.
