Review | Hong Kong artist uses ambient sounds and white noise to ask: who controls what we hear in our daily lives?
- Hong Kong artist Samson Young uses music, ambient sounds and white noise to examine the impact of what we hear around us on our daily lives and mental state
- Through an installation showing a violist playing a haunting tune, fans hidden inside 3D columns, and childlike drawings, he asks who controls our soundscapes
Unlike most art exhibitions, sound is the key to understanding Samson Young Kar-fai’s “Music for selective hearing, or assisted living”.
Featuring five sets of artworks, the multimedia artist’s latest solo exhibition, at the Kiang Malingue gallery in Aberdeen on Hong Kong Island’s south side, explores the complicated nature of “sound conditioning”.
By drawing the attention of viewers (and listeners) to ambient sounds and white noise, Young’s exhibition pushes people to consider how sounds can represent a negotiation between control and freedom.
People may choose to fall asleep to sounds of rain or long playlists of smooth piano jazz as a form of self-care and recuperation – even self-imposed isolation and wilful disengagement – but other types of white noise, such as the playing of music in public spaces as a policing tactic, may represent how we obliviously expose ourselves to control.