ArtAsiaPacific: Samson Young

Published May/June issue of ArtAsiaPacific. To read full article, visit the magazine's Digital Library. (Click on the image to scroll through pages.) 

"During Young’s childhood, the port city was a bustling nexus of financial, cultural and industrial activity. Scrappy upstarts bloomed alongside international conglomerates. Some of the artist’s earliest memories were of the world of sound traveling to him through the spinning crackle of a record and a radio’s palm-sized speakers. Speaking from his industrial studio in Hong Kong, Young recalled that his mother worked at the technical appliances company General Electric. Once a year, she would bring home a cardboard box the size of a paperback book; within it would be the latest model of a portable radio set assembled in the factory where she was employed. Young infrequently saw his father, an entrepreneur who founded a travel agency, but he remembers his obsession with music, which manifested in towers of LaserDiscs and cutting-edge audio gadgets. This in turn fueled Young’s love of video games and media. “That was really an era of aspirations. Everyone aspired to a certain lifestyle, beautiful things,” he stated wistfully. “It was a special moment for Hong Kong. It was before Tiananmen Square happened. There was still some time left on the clock before the handover [of sovereignty to mainland China, in 1997]. The economy in the city really started to pick up in a big way.""

ArtAsiaPacific: Review of "Summer Triangle" at OCAT, Shenzhen

Published in Nov/Dec 2016 issue of ArtAsiaPacific. For full story, visit the magazine's Digital Library. 

"Like memories of Hong Kong’s neon glister, the fantastical, starry images from “Summer Triangle” linger in one’s mind. This is perhaps because the exhibiting artists, as urban anthropologists, effectively excavated narratives of popular media that live in the collective consciousness of Hong Kong, by filtering what we remember of a city and also what we can’t forget."

ArtAsiaPacific: Where I Work with Trevor Yeung

"Behind a narrow nursery in Mong Kok’s Flower Market, tiny plant specimens glow like mutant organisms under a pulsing UV light. Hong Kong artist Trevor Yeung inspects their bulbous caudices. Some sprout baby vines as thin as hairs; others carry cracks like those found on hoary tortoise shells. Although diminutive in size, these plants—some of which are saplings that will eventually become trees—will add meters to their height over time. "

ArtReview: Review of "Super Reliable," a solo show by Evan Robarts

"With his arsenal of fabric mops, Hydrocal plaster, hoses and linoleum, Robarts presents a series of paintings and two sculptures that test the elastic functionalities of these materials, transforming their basic characters into figures for the city's real-estate woes and the tenants of the buildings he looked after."