M+, West Kowloon Cultural District to Collaborate with HKADC at 57th Venice Art Biennale Artist Samson Young and Curator Ying Kwok selected as Hong Kong’s submission for Participation

M+ at the West Kowloon Cultural District and Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) announce that the two organisations will co-present Hong Kong’s participation in the 57th Venice Art Biennale (the Biennale), opening on May 13, 2017. This is the third collaboration between M+ and HKADC, following the acclaimed 2013 and 2015 editions, on this representation of Hong Kong contemporary art at one of the most important international platforms.


Dr Wilfred Wong, Chairman of HKADC said, “Building on the successful collaborations in the last two Venice Biennales, HKADC and M+ are again ready to contribute our resources and expertise to promoting outstanding Hong Kong visual artist in the 57th Biennale.”


Recommended by M+ and endorsed by HKADC’s Venice Art Biennale Working Group, Mr Samson Young has been selected as the artist for the exhibition, which will be submitted to the Venice Biennale as a Collateral Event in the 57th Venice Biennale. For this edition, M+ will engage a guest curator, in an effort to nurture local curators through providing experience in a major international setting. In close consultation with Mr Young, Ms Ying Kwok, a widely respected Hong Kong-based curator, has been appointed as the guest curator. Mr Doryun Chong, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, and Acting Director, M+, who was a co-curator with Stella Fong for the 2015 edition, will serve as consulting curator.


Mr Chong said, “We are honored and pleased to co-present with HKADC Hong Kong’s participation in the Venice Biennale for the third time. I am proud of what we at M+ accomplished in the last two Biennales with one-person presentations of Hong Kong artists—Lee Kit in 2013 and Tsang Kin-Wah in 2015—both in terms of the polished, professional exhibitions and in successfully raising the profiles of the artists as well as the international understanding of the Hong Kong contemporary art scene in general. I am confident that we will have yet another successful presentation, which will also be a vital opportunity for growth for Mr Samson Young’s critically respected practice.”


Commenting on being selected as the artist of Hong Kong’s submission, Mr Young said "I am naturally thrilled, and feel very honoured to have been given the opportunity to represent my native Hong Kong within such an important international context. I look forward to collaborating with the curatorial team in the months to come." 


Ms Kwok said "I am much honoured and privileged to be invited to work on this prestigious event. I look forward to developing an in-depth dialogue and collaboration with Samson to create something really special. I would also like to thank HKADC and M+ for their forward-thinking approach in engaging an independent curator."


Same as the last two editions, interns will be recruited locally and given the chance to assist with the exhibition and experience the Venice Biennale. M+ will create one position of assistant curator and HKADC will fund a curatorial intern position specifically for this project in order to foster and develop local expertise by providing an opportunity to work with the M+ team over an extended period. The 57th Biennale will be held from 13th May to 26th November 2017. More information on Hong Kong’s participation and related programmes will be announced later.
 

Remarks

West Kowloon Cultural District

Located on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, the West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong. With a complex of theatres, performance spaces, and M+, the West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, as well as provide 23 hectares of public open space, including a two kilometre waterfront promenade.


M+

Hong Kong’s museum for visual culture – encompassing twentieth and twenty-first century art, design and architecture, and moving image from Hong Kong, China, Asia, and beyond – M+ will be one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world. Located adjacent to the park on the waterfront, the museum building is scheduled to open in 2019.


Artist: Samson Young

Artist and composer Samson Young (b.1979) studied music, philosophy and gender studies at the University of Sydney and holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University. Young's diverse practice draws from the avant-garde compositional traditions of aleatoric music, musique concrète, and graphical notation. Behind each project is an extensive process of research, involving a mapping of the process through a series of "sound sketches" and audio recordings. His drawing, radio broadcast, performance and composition touch upon the recurring topics of conflict, war, and political frontiers. Key to Young’s interest in conflict is its interplay with identity. Young appropriates the components of music – beat, rhythm, notational signs and musical symbols – to flesh out global conflicts that have affected our past and present.


Young was the inaugural winner of the BMW Art Journey Award at the Art Basel Hong Kong 2015. He has participated in group exhibitions at venues including 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; Asia Triennial, Manchester; Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle; Arko Art Center, Seoul; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland; the Moscow Biennale of Young Art, Moscow; Amos Anderson Museum, Helsinki; Today Art Museum, Beijing; and Taipei Contemporary Art Museum, Taiwan. Recent and upcoming solo projects include Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2015); Team Gallery, New York (2015); Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); Experimenter, India (August 2016); and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (December 2016).


As a practising musician, Young is the member of multiple bands and has collaborated with ensembles and orchestras worldwide. He has participated in international music and performing art festivals including Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt; Fusebox Festival, Austin; New York Electronic Art Festival, New York; Tonlagen Festival, Dresden; Transart Festival, Bolzano; and MONA FOMA Festival of Music and Art.


Curator: Ying Kwok

As an independent curator, Ying Kwok has focused much of her work on what she calls “boundaries of collaboration” between curators, artists, and the wider community. After graduating from the Department of Fine Arts at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with the Chevening Postgraduate Scholarship by British Council, Ying Kwok obtained her master’s degree from the Chelsea College of Arts and Design, University of the Arts London, the United Kingdom in 2004.


Working as the curator at the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester in the UK between 2006 and 2012, Kwok was responsible for the Centre’s artistic programme, organizing exhibitions accompanied by related talks and events, and also oversaw the artist residency programme. She has built up a wide network of contacts with organisations in the UK and Asia through frequent collaboration projects and exchanges. To encourage critical thinking and effective discussions in Hong Kong, Kwok initiated Art Appraisal Club in 2014. In 2015, Kwok was awarded the Asia Cultural Council Fellowship to carry out a five-month-long research on participatory and engagement projects in the US.