Features artasiapacific.com^95(Opposite page)
THE COFFEE CANTATA (INSTITUTE OF
FICTIONAL ETHNOMUSICOLOGY) (detail),
2015, created in collaboration with Michael
Schiefel ( jazz vocalist) and Priman Lee (stage
designer), video (original song), C-prints on
aluminum, neon sign, objects, documents and
performance, dimensions variable. Courtesy the
artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong.
(This page)
PO MEANS ORDINARY IN CHINESE,
2007, still from performance video:
9 min. Courtesy the artist.
pipes. Not even electricity.” Spurred by this tale of foolish speculation,
Young collaborated with jazz vocalist Michael Schiefel and stage
designer Priman Lee to write a contemporary adaptation of Bach’s
Schweigt Stille, Plaudert Nicht (“Be Quiet, Stop Chattering”) (1732–34),
in which the protagonist waxes lyrical about the wonders of coffee.
They cooked up a fictional character, Michael Kar Fai Young (“That’s
me and him [Schiefel] combined. It’s my way of putting myself in my
pieces... he’s crazy, super nervous... just like me!”), who operates
a coffee station in a caravan on the land purchased by Young senior,
and spends the long, arid desert days pouring hot drinks for no one. As
Young envisioned it, at night the caravan would unfold and transform
into a jazz club where Michael sings. The premise is as outlandish
as the work was unaffordable: only one portion of the piece could be
carried out, but it was important, Young mentioned, for the artist and
his team to plan the artwork as if they had no limitations—as if they
had all the money in the world and all their dreams could be fulfilled.
Young exhibited this work at the nonprofit arts space Oi! in Hong
Kong in 2015, featuring a costume for the fictional Michael Kar Fai
Young, papers pertaining to the land ownership and mysterious
crib notes referencing a myriad of sources, from the works of Twin
Peaks (1990–91) director David Lynch to French cultural theorist
Paul Virilio. A video, which is a recording of the only event to take
place within the desert, sees Schiefel performing as Michael Kar
Fai Young among the saltbush and yucca. With only his voice, a
microphone and a sampler, he adapts Bach’s “Coffee Cantata” using
a host of sounds, from the guttural to the airiest of falsetto touches.
Clear notes float in the landscape, crystallizing a dialectical image of
Young’s childhood, of a lost generation of dreams, and of humanity’s
constant, often futile, search for something better.
The Samson Chord
Soon after the handover in 1997, long shadows were cast over Hong
Kong. Pressured by waves of paranoia due to the impending transfer
of power to China, the teenage Young and his family uprooted to
Sydney. The story of his family’s immigration to Australia—which
at the time was roiled by xenophobic parliament member Pauline
Hanson and her right-wing party, One Nation—would be the start of
Young’s metaphorical bildungsroman. In high school, he excelled at
art and music but found the atmosphere discriminatory, especially
toward those of Asian descent, and he struggled with his sexuality.
In a series of essays recounting the journey for “For Whom the Bell
Tolls,” he explained that he would “sneak out to the family vehicle,
map and torch in hand, and drive up to two hours to some random
older boy’s or man’s house—mostly white, more often man than boy.”
The very concept of these boundaries of sexuality and ethnicity
tugged and gnawed at him. On his website, thismusicisfalse.com,
this anguish can still be read in the artist’s distinctive, tart language:
“Stop telling me to stop dichotomizing the East and the West. I am
not done yet. Stop delegitimizing my site of resistance. Somebody
else’s version of permeability always wins, and then I get pushed
to keep moving along, when my lived reality is actually anchored
unless I’m pushed or pulled.”
Young enrolled in a BA in both music and psychology at the
University of Sydney, from which he graduated in 2002. His intent
was never to follow through with the latter subject, however, and he
dropped it after a few semesters. Music became his lifeblood and a way
of measuring his developing synesthesia; for example, he saw the key
of C Major as a pleasant, canary yellow. “Funnily enough, I think my
artistic side and my musical side really started to flourish in Australia,
in a way they probably wouldn’t have if I was still in Hong Kong,”
Young mused. As an undergraduate, he learned about the rigorous
structures of the Western classical music lineage—Mozart, Beethoven,
Handel—which historically spotlights pitch as dominant over rhythm
or articulation. He composed and performed pieces for string quartets
and orchestras in elegiac styles.
However, when Young moved back to Hong Kong in 2004 to
continue his music studies for an MPhil at the University of Hong
Kong, his impressions of music and music-making evolved. After his
migration from pre-handover Hong Kong to Australia and to post-
handover Hong Kong, he felt new impetus to upbraid perimeters
surrounding not just music, but sound itself—perhaps as an anarchic
reaction to the world changing around him and the narrow focus of
music that he had been taught. He began spending his days at the
nonprofit arts space Videotage, where he discovered the genre of
new-media art and started collaborating with figures such as poet
Ron Lam and video artist Christopher Lau. “There was probably
nothing further from my world of music,” Young said of what he
experienced at the time. “I saw people doing all these really weird
things with the computer and I think a light bulb just went on because
I had always been into computers and playing video games, and then I
saw how people could actually combine an artistic interest with these
things.” Young’s earliest works that transgressed the limitations of
classical Western music includes the video work Po Means Ordinary
in Chinese (2007), in which the artist and a friend donned Teletubby
suits and explored Hong Kong against a voiceover of Deng Xiaoping’s
famous 1989 speech, “Build Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,”
rendered with text-to-speech technology. The same year, Lau and
Young made Happiest Hour, a sound and audio installation of gutted
and rewired Nintendo Gameboys that won the Bloomberg Emerging