Hong Kong Arts Centre Announces Inaugural Honorary Fellowship Recipients

On July 25, the Hong Kong Arts Centre (HKAC) announced in a press release that Hong Kong composer and artist Samson Young and comic-book artist Theresa Lee Wai-chun are the inaugural fellows of the non-profit multi-arts institution’s new Honorary Fellowship program, launched in celebration of the HKAC’s 40th anniversary. The conferment ceremony, along with artist talks by the two awardees, were held in the evening of the same day.

The fellows were selected on the basis of their accomplishments in the art field—including visual arts, public arts, music, theater, dance, comics and animation, film, media arts and curatorship—as well as commitment to nurturing emerging artists. 

A Princeton doctorate in music composition, Young is recognized for his immersive multimedia installations that involve heavy historical research and experimentation with sounds ranging from video-game tunes to Cantonese nursery rhymes. His works often seek to defamiliarize the familiar, and delve into themes of identity politics, conflict, and popular culture. He received the inaugural BMW Art Journey Award in 2015 at Art Basel Hong Kong, and represented his home-city at the 57th Venice Biennale. 

Theresa Lee is a Hong Kong-based comic artist renowned for her 13 Dots series, with which she popularized the genre of girl comics in the local art scene and beyond from the 1960s to the ’80s.

Regarding this year’s fellows, HKAC chairman of the board of governors Dominica Yang remarked: “The Honorary Fellowships recognize exceptional achievements in both local and international art scenes beyond Asia, as well as significant devotions to nurturing the next generation of talented artists. Our awardees of this year, Ms. Theresa Lee Wai-chun and Mr. Samson Young Kar-fai, have both not only developed deep ties to the HKAC in unique ways, but also shared the same enlightening vision and passion as ours.”

Phoebe Tam is an editorial intern of ArtAsiaPacific.

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