Samson Young: So You Are Old by the Time You Reach the Island

Hong Kong sound artist Samson Young will present “So You Are Old by the Time You Reach the Island”, an interactive multi-media walk during the 2016 Hong Kong edition of Art Basel.

“So You Are Old by the Time You Reach the Island” is a “multi-media walk” which will take the visitors of the upcoming Art Basel show in Hong Kong out of the Convention Center and onto the streets of the Wanchai and Admiralty districts of Hong Kong on a time- and site-specific journey that weaves together institutional histories of place with fictions and personal narratives. Reference point for this journey is the lost “golden bell” that once adorned the Rodney Block of the (now demolished) Victoria Barracks in Admiralty. This bell gave the Admiralty district its Chinese name. On the afternoon of Thursday, March 24 from 1:15pm to 7:30pm, over the course of six hours, small groups of people will depart the Convention Center on the walk. Each participant will receive a portable media player and headphones along with a bag holding various small objects, maps and instructions necessary to complete the journey. Walking individually or in groups, over the course of the next hour the participants will be led to a series of iconic and obscure locations in Hong Kong, where they will experience pre-recorded films and sounds, live actions and performances that had been painstakingly orchestrated by Samson Young and his performers and collaborators, including jazz vocalist Michael Schiefel, who contributed many of his original songs and plays one of the many mysterious characters that the audience will encounter during this walk.

The work adds a new chapter to “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, an ongoing project which won Samson Young the inaugural BMW Art Journey in 2015.