Relational Drawings

The body of works on paper proposed for Art Basel OVR: Portals are relational drawings that present a play of negotiation and interpersonal interactions that Young has shared with people over the past year: a community-building conversation that split into forking paths; an ensemble of old and new friends who speculated on decentralized collaboration; an art adjudication meeting that convened over the internet – these interpersonal events are recounted through notations, mark-making, written word and stamped symbols.

The drawings explore ideas of proximity and distance in the digital, visual and aural transmission of sonority, relational group dynamics in the construction of multidimensional live projects with various stakeholders and the interstices between pause and movement, using several gestural tools that define Young’s work. Each work addresses a definitive set of actions and reactions that bring into focus our altered contemporary conditions of human distance and solitude, fragmentation and cohesion in recalibrated interactions.

Multi-disciplinary artist Samson Young (born 1979, Hong Kong) works in sound, performance, video, and installation. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University in 2013. In 2017, he represented Hong Kong at the 57th Venice Biennale. Other solo projects include the De Appel, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; SMART Museum, Chicago; Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art in Manchester; M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Ryosoku-in at Kenninji Temple, Kyoto; and Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, among others. Selected group exhibitions include Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Performa 19, New York; Biennale of Sydney; Shanghai Biennale; National Museum of Art, Osaka; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Ars Electronica, Linz; and documenta 14: documenta radio, among others. In 2020, he was awarded the inaugural Uli Sigg Prize. His works are in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; SMART Museum, Chicago; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art Busan; and Kadist, among others.