The artist produced a video and 12-channel sound installation as part of his ongoing series *Muted Situations*, 2014–ongoing. The series foregrounds the masked moments that take place in our everyday sonic experiences. By consciously ‘muting’ the sonic foreground, the less-commonly noticed layers are revealed. The artist has written a series of short instructional texts describing hypothetical situations, a few of which he has already staged, to draw attention to unnoticed sounds. Numbered from 1 to 22, this expanding set of scenarios range from *Muted Dance Party*, *Muted Non-Violent Protest* to *Muted Taoist Funeral Ritual of Hell-breaking*.

In the latest iteration of the ongoing project, *Muted Situation #22: Muted Tchaikovsky’s 5th*, 2018, the artist invites the Flora Sinfonie Orchester in Cologne to perform Tchaikovsky’s *5th Symphony* in its entirety. The orchestra, however, has been asked to ‘mute’ the musical notes, suppressing the pitched foreground layer of the composition, and bringing forth the sounds produced by physical actions in a performance¬¬–the musicians’ focused breath, the turning of pages, or the clicking noises of the instruments’ keys.

On the process of muting, the artist writes: “... muting is not the same as doing nothing. Rather, the act of muting is an intensely focused re-imagination and re-construction of the auditory. It involves the conscious suppression of dominant voices, as a way to uncover the unheard and the marginalized, or to make apparent certain assumptions about hearing and sounding.” The process has the effect of disrupting the viewer’s expectations; when the piercing shriek of a violin fails to come forth, it feels anticlimactic, ridiculous even. The artist’s situational experiments reveal what is suppressed, enabling us to become aware of another layer of reality underneath the noise.

(Description excerpted from Sydney Biennale's website.)

Links: https://www.thismusicisfalse.com/muted-tchaikovsky/

Performed by the Flora Sinfonie Orchester, conducted by Thomas Jung.
Commissioned by the 21st Biennale of Sydney, the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre, and the Hong Kong Art Promotion Office

Samson Young (HK). Multi-disciplinary artist, composer, Ph.D. in Music Composition (Princeton, 2013). In 2017 he represented Hong Kong in a solo project at the Hong Kong Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale. Solo projects and exhibitions include Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; SMART Museum, Chicago; Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Manchester; M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong; and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. International group exhibitions in New York, Sydney, Shanghai, Osaka, and Seoul, among others. Recipient of various awards. His works are held in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Japan; and Israel Museum, Jerusalem.