Hong Kong Venice Biennale show comes to city’s M+ Pavilion, and amplifies history of charity songs and concerts with extra exhibits
Samson Young’s ‘Songs for Disaster Relief World Tour’ exhibition at M+ takes a swipe at the niche musical genre of charity singles, while additional exhibits not shown in Venice highlight the poignant history of Hong Kong’s own efforts
It is all “hail the conquering hero” at the West Kowloon Cultural District’s M+ Pavilion as it hosts the homecoming of Samson Young Kar-fai’s Venice Biennale exhibition. But who is the real hero here?
A clue can be found in the exhibition’s pop-up shop, where replicas of a jacket worn by one Boomtown Gundane during his “world tour” are for sale. Indeed, most of Young’s show seems to be a tribute to this imaginary character with a crazy backstory.
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Gundane, according to Young, is a singer-songwriter from Cape Town who wrote the song Yes We Do in retaliation to Do They Know It’s Christmas?, the 1984 song by US charity supergroup Band Aid written in reaction to the Ethiopian famine. That was the high point of Gundane’s career.
Now, he is schizophrenic and out of work, let down by his belief in Pythagoras logic and Reagonomics, and performs to an audience of gas flares in a remote American oil town where the local shale industry has imploded.
You can visit his living room and sit on his couch while watching a video of his performance (in which he is played by singer Michael Schiefel), surrounded by personal paraphernalia such as busts of Ronald Reagan.