Physics meets art in the sounds of impossible instruments at Samson Young exhibition
- Hong Kong artist’s collaboration with University of Edinburgh has turned esoteric physics into something magical
- Compositions for impossible instruments play in a loop while strange parts of giant instruments poke through walls
The unusual setting of the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre enhances the surreal nature of Samson Young’s exhibition “Instrumentation”.
Young, who has just been named one of the six finalists in contention for the M+ museum of visual culture’s inaugural Sigg Prize, has been working with a special unit at the University of Edinburgh that studies the sound made by impossible instruments.
Think a 30-metre tuba, a piano the size of a thumbnail, or a trumpet the size of a football field.
Tessa Giblin, director of the university’s Talbot Rice Gallery, who initiated the partnership, says it demonstrates how a highly specialised branch of physics can have a role in contemporary art and vice versa, with both parties helping to push each other’s boundaries.
Young has turned esoteric physics into something magical. The first thing you see as you step into the first gallery of the usually serene centre next to Hong Kong Park is one end of a giant trumpet that nearly reaches the ceiling and extends into the corridor outside. Next to it, a silent video shows a stadium crowd visibly moved by a bugle call played by a dragon – on an impossibly long bugle, obviously – which nicely blends the Edinburgh experiment with Young’s long-running “Muted Situations” series – performance art works in which the foreground sound layer is suppressed to reveal other layers (for example, a lion dance performed without music).
