Incidents of Travel: Samson Young

“Moderation(s),” the yearlong program initiated by Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in collaboration with Hong Kong’s nonprofit Spring Workshop, kicked off with the residency of Barcelona-based curatorial duo Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna). For their project Incidents of Travel, the curators invited four Hong Kong artists to develop tours of the city. 

In February, sound and media artist Samson Young guided a day-long walk through Kwun Tong and Tsim Bei Tsui. 

The tour began in the early morning with a sound-walk through Kwun Tong, a district on the eastern side of the Kowloon Peninsula. Young handed out portable audio devices that streamed his work Urban Palimpsest (2009), a soundtrack of the city compiled from different days and times traveling along the route. During the tour, Young paused at various overlooked places: wet markets, tiny alleyways, abandoned buildings. 

Urban Palimpsest serves as an audio history of the rapidly transforming neighborhood. Previously a salt pond, Kwun Tong is now one of the main industrial areas in Hong Kong lined with low-income residential blocks. Its attractive low rent and large spaces are bringing more residents and signs of gentrification.

In the second leg of the tour, Young brought us to the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China. Access to certain sections of this in-between land, Tsim Bei Tsui (Frontier Closed Area), was recently made public and will continue to open up in phases. We walked along the fence up to a guard station while listening to Liquid Borders 1 (Tsim Bei Tsui & Sha Tau Kok) (2012), a composition of stacked sound recordings from the patrolled space. 

Young concluded the city walkabout with sites more personal to him: Queen’s Pier in front of City Hall and the Lotus Pond at the University of Hong Kong. Both places mark significant times in Young’s career, with the demolition of Queen’s Pier bringing him back to Hong Kong from New York in 2009 and the Lotus Pond representing his classical training as a composer.

At the Lotus Pond, the group read, reflected, and discussed, ending the day having had a heightened experience of the city’s soundscape. 

Samson Young’s works can be seen in “Revolution Per Minute” at Colgate University, New York, from March 26 through April 26.