Venice Biennale show of Hong Kong’s Samson Young explores the ground between utopia and dystopia
The Hong Kong Pavilion is showing a dense and detailed body of work, sarcastic and yet tender, which examines the way good intentions can go bad and the relationship between privilege and poverty.
Visitors to Hong Kong’s presentation in this year’s Venice Biennale are likely to feel a bit discombobulated, rather like the uneven, oddly shaped choir platform in the courtyard that resembles an unfinished game of Rubik’s Snake. Risers, as the work is called, may offer treacherous pitfalls, but its velvety, primary coloured covering still makes it inviting and cheerful, and it’s a great place for exhausted Biennale visitors to perch and bask in the Italian sun.
That’s basically Samson Young Kar-fai’s exhibition in a nutshell. You emerge from “Songs for Disaster Relief” and its intriguing, surreal symbols not entirely sure whether his is a benign world or a dystopia.
The ambiguity reflects Young’s own views. He told the Post in an earlier interview that the project originates from the uneasiness he feels towards charity singles – songs recorded by celebrity musicians to raise money and awareness about victims of natural disasters and other causes. These include Do They Know It’s Christmas? and We Are the World, recorded to raise funds for the relief of the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s, and Hong Kong’s own examples, such as a cover version of Bridge Over Troubled Water that was recorded for the eastern China floods in 1991.
Hong Kong’s 2017 Venice Biennale show inspired by charity singles and the bad side of trying to do good
“My feelings about these songs are complicated,” he said. “There are obvious critiques, such as imperialism and how the increasingly globalised music industry has profited from them. But what I really feel conflicted about is how an act that was driven by the wish to do good always appears problematic in hindsight.”
He is determined not to dismiss such efforts wholesale, but a rather cynical alter ego called Boomtown Gundane dominates part one of the Venice show. The name isn’t original. Young had read on the internet that a Cape Town singer-songwriter of that name had written a song in response to the patronising tone of Do They Know It’s Christmas?, cheekily called Yes We Do. That turned out to be a piece of fake news on a now-defunct South African satirical website, Hayibo.
But Young was so enamoured of the idea of Boomtown Gundane that he decided to flesh out the character and make him the star of this show. His Boomtown Gundane lives in the Palazzo Gundane, located in Williston, North Dakota, a town that sits above America’s largest oil deposit, which has only been accessible since the arrival of new fracking technology about a decade ago.