Silver Moon or Golden Star: A Conversation About Utopia 

Drink Reception 6:00pm
Lecture 6:30pm
Close 7:30pm

Loosely taking the idealism displayed at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago as a point of departure, multimedia artist Samson Young discusses his current exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago which ends on December 15th, 2019. The exhibition, Silver Moon or Golden Star: Which will you buy of me? asks how people adapt to societal changes that they have little control over. For Young, “progress” as it was defined in the 1933 fair’s subtitle “A Century of Progress” represents a specific variant of aspirational and utopian thinking. This discussion focuses on how utopian views continue to be projected on and taken up by society. Young and exhibition curator, Orianna Cacchione will be joined with art writer and curator, Yang Yeung. 

Yang Yeung is a writer of art and an independent curator. She founded the non-profit "soundpocket" in 2008 and is currently its Artistic Director. In 2015, she started an independent project A Walk with A3 located in a back alley in Causeway Bay in Hong Kong to support the right of art to be on the streets and right of pedestrians to encounter art as an everyday experience. She is a member of the independent art critics collective Art Appraisal Club (HK) and the International Art Critics Association (HK). She was awarded the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in 2013-14. She currently teaches classics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Multi-disciplinary artist Samson Young was trained as a composer and graduated with a Ph.D. 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 distinctive contemporary art practice. Young has exhibited his work around the world, including the Hong Kong Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, M+ Pavilion in Hong Kong, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art in Manchester, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He received the 2015 BMW Art Journey Award and 2018 Hong Kong Art Centre Honorary Fellowship. Further awards include Artist of the Year (Hong Kong Arts Development Council), Prix Ars Electronica, Bloomberg Emerging Artist Award. 

Orianna Cacchione is Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago. Her curatorial practice is committed to expanding the canon of contemporary art to respond to the global circulations of art and ideas. At the Smart Museum, she worked with Wu Hung to organize the major exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China,and is currently developing a project with Samson Young. Cacchione holds a Ph.D. in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego, and her scholarly research explores the transnational, cross-geographic flows of art and art history that characterize the global art world, and has been published in The Journal of Art Historiography, Yishu, and theJournal of Contemporary Chinese Art.

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