Visiting artist Samson Cheung, from Hong Kong, has been in residency at ESS for several weeks, inaugurating the new Wavefront international artist exchange program with soundpocket.
During this, his first artist residency, Samson found that the gap between himself and the culture of Chicago is wider than he expected. For the first couple of weeks, making field recordings and listening alone were the most comfortable ways for him to communicate with this place. But at a certain point, he found that directly interacting with people, feelings and experiences was a better way to engage in this energetic city, and his sound recorder was no longer required. Instead, he began to listen and to be heard in each encounter. He went from passive documentarian to active interlocutor.
In his performance As I have listened / Please chat with me, Samson invites the audience to respond, interact, and improvise with the evolving contents of his journey, using objects, texts, and simple instructions based on his experiences. This reflects his change of mind from a passive to an active way of adapting to a new place, and creates yet another new layer of his (shared) memories in Chicago.
Saturday, May 9
Reception at 6pm; performance at 7pm
Free admission
About the Artist
Samson Cheung was born and resides in Hong Kong, where he has been studying photography since 2008; he received a Postgraduate Diploma in Photography from HKU SPACE in 2012. Since then, he has pursued an interest in sound and field recording, making work whose main focus is "on the sea and the interaction between nature and artificiality." During his time in Chicago, he plans to share his daily listening experiences to his blog, which focuses on field recording as a mode of sonic diary-keeping, exploring "how sound constructs people's memory and history, and their imagination of the present and future."
About Wavefront
The Wavefront Artist Residency is a new international artist residency exchange partnership between Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) and soundpocket, a sonic arts organization based in Hong Kong. With support from the MacArthur Foundation International Connections Fund, ESS will send a Chicago artist to Hong Kong for one month in fall 2015 to research, create, and share. ESS is now accepting proposals from Chicago-area artists. The submission deadline is May 15, 2015.