Samson Young wins the inaugural Sigg Prize

M+ is pleased to announce Hong Kong–based artist Samson Young as the winner of the inaugural Sigg Prize. The jury was unanimously impressed by Young’s vivid, multifaceted approach to sound and performance, clearly articulated in his installation Muted Situations #22: Muted Tchaikovsky’s 5th, on view in the Sigg Prize 2019 exhibition alongside works by five other shortlisted artists at the M+ Pavilion until May 17, 2020. The work presents an orchestral performance in which the musicians mute the notes they play, drawing the audience’s attention to sounds that often go unnoticed. The Sigg Prize, established by M+ in Hong Kong in 2018, was formerly the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA), founded by Uli Sigg in China in 1998 and presided over by Liu Li Anna from 2011 until 2018. A biennial award recognising important artistic practices in the Greater China region, the Sigg Prize is open to artists born or working in the region, with the intention to highlight and promote diverse and exciting work on an international scale. Young wins a cash prize of HKD 500,000. HKD 100,000 will be awarded to the five other shortlisted candidates: Hu Xiaoyuan, Liang Shuo, Lin Yilin, Shen Xin, and Tao Hui.

The Sigg Prize jury comments: "Samson Young takes sound as source material, in an experimental practice rooted in his background in music composition. By muting the melody in an orchestral performance, he brings peripheral sounds to the fore. With an element of humour, Young prompts audiences to focus on what is often overlooked or ignored, and to question the essence of the music and the collective ambition. By silencing the dominant sound, the work mirrors elements of current political dynamics."

M+ established the Sigg Prize to place contemporary artistic practices from the Greater China region in a global context. The museum is committed to developing a new focus in the current conversation on visual culture, one that is cross-disciplinary, transnational, and centred on Asia. The prize is a major platform for this work, allowing M+ to trace connections and adjacencies in contemporary art with an emphasis that is now more important to articulate than ever before. The prize defines a close relationship with the M+ Sigg Collection, a cornerstone of the M+ Collections and one of the most significant collections of Chinese contemporary art in the world.

For the inaugural edition of the Sigg Prize, co-chaired by Suhanya Raffel and Liu Li Anna, the members of the jury are Maria Balshaw (Director, Tate, United Kingdom), Bernard Blistène (Director, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris), Gong Yan (Director, Power Station of Art, Shanghai), Lai Hsiangling (curator, Taipei), Suhanya Raffel (Museum Director, M+, Hong Kong), Uli Sigg (collector and member of the M+ Board, Switzerland), and Xu Bing (artist, Beijing).

For more information, please visit mplus.org.hk/siggprize2019.

About Samson Young
Multidisciplinary artist Samson Young was trained as a composer and graduated with a PhD in Music Composition from Princeton University in 2013. His academic background in music has led him to incorporate elements of experimental music, sound studies, and site-specific performance into his art practice. He uses sound as a tool, cutting through the veil of the everyday to uncover ideologies and political propositions. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester, M+, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Biennale of Sydney; the Shanghai Biennale; the National Museum of Art, Osaka; and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul; as well as in Documenta Radio for Documenta 14. He received the BMW Art Journey Award in 2015 and the Hong Kong Arts Centre Honorary Fellowship in 2018. In 2017, he represented Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition co-organised by M+ and Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

About M+
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, we are building one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. Our aim is to create a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s 21st century.

About the West Kowloon Cultural District
The West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest and most ambitious cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong on forty hectares of reclaimed land located alongside Victoria Harbour. With a varied mix of theatres, performance spaces, and museums, the West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, providing 23 hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.