Hong Kong based composer and artist Samson Young has been awarded the inaugural BMW Art journey Prize, a collaborative project with Art Basel. Samson’s award-winning project, which explores the relationship between bells and conflict, will involve him travelling to Myanmar, Kenya, Austria, Cologne, Morocco, Sicily, South Korea, Australia, the UK and the Us, where he will notate and record the sounds of historically resonant bells. As a result of his research the artist will then generate an archive of bell recordings, a series of ‘bell sound sketches’, a set of new bronze bells and an original musical composition for bell-ringers and orchestra.
One of Young’s starting points for the project was the acknowledgement that cannons and bells are made of essentially the same materials and that in times of war bells would be melted down to create cannons, and when peace returned, bells would be recast from surplus weapons.
21 May 2015
